Nepal's air safety crisis extends beyond mountains to outdated tech and regulatory failures

On a Sunday in January, a Yeti Airlines passenger plane descended toward Pokhara's newly built airport and never completed its landing. The aircraft, an ATR 72-500 that had been flying for fifteen years, went down into a river gorge during what should have been the final minutes of a short hop from Kathmandu. Seventy-two people were on board—five of them Indian nationals. All are feared dead. By the measure of aviation disasters, this ranks as Nepal's third-worst accident on record.

The crash was not an anomaly in Nepal's skies. Since 2010, the country has endured eleven fatal plane crashes. On average, Nepal experiences one aviation disaster per year. The pattern is so consistent, so grim, that it has become almost routine to ask: why does flying in Nepal remain so catastrophically unsafe?

The answer begins with geography but does not end there. Nepal sits at the heart of the Himalayas, home to eight of the world's fourteen highest peaks, including Everest. The capital, Kathmandu, occupies a valley surrounded by mountains on all sides—a bowl, as one commercial pilot described it, with an airport nestled in the middle. Planes must take off and land at high altitudes where thin air reduces aircraft performance and makes deceleration harder. Weather in the region shifts without warning. Visibility vanishes. Pilots flying smaller aircraft report that their planes lack the radar and GPS technology needed to detect these sudden, unpredictable conditions. The Tenzing-Hillary Airport in Lukla, serving the Everest region, is considered the world's most dangerous airfield: a single runway that angles downward toward a valley below. Nepal's civil aviation authority acknowledged in a 2019 safety report that the country's "diversity of weather patterns together with hostile topography" create conditions where accidents involving small aircraft occur at comparatively higher rates.

But Nepal's air safety crisis extends well beyond the mountains. The aircraft operating on domestic routes are old. Many lack the modern equipment—radar, GPS—that could compensate for the region's treacherous conditions. Yeti Airlines, which began operations two decades ago, operates exclusively ATR 72-500s. The plane that crashed on Sunday was fifteen years old. A year earlier, in May 2022, a Tara Air aircraft went down shortly after takeoff from Pokhara. That plane had first flown in 1979 and carried no modern technology that might have warned the pilot of danger. Captain Bed Upreti, speaking to The Guardian, put the problem plainly: "We can't afford to keep flying aircraft that are 43 years old. The technology, or lack of, is dangerous to be flying in a place like Nepal." The European Union has refused to permit any Nepali airline to operate services to EU airspace since 2013, citing safety concerns.

The third layer of the problem sits in Nepal's regulatory structure itself. The Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal serves as both the regulator and the service provider—it writes the safety rules and operates the airports. This dual role creates an inherent conflict of interest. The European Commission and the United Nations International Civil Aviation Organisation have pressed Nepal since 2009 to separate these functions, to draw a clear line between who enforces safety and who profits from operations. More than fifteen years have passed. Nothing has changed. According to reporting by the Kathmandu Post, political resistance has blocked the split. Insiders told the newspaper that senior officials within the aviation authority would lose benefits and influence if the organization were divided. Tourism ministers and political leaders have made repeated public pledges to reform the system. Each pledge has gone unfulfilled. Aviation analyst Hemant Arjyal captured the stasis: "The problem lies in our system. No one cares about the country. The politicians are wise while making pledges and commitments. But this is the task that we should do. Pledges will not work."

Nepal's air safety crisis is not a mystery. It is not even particularly complicated. The country faces genuine, unavoidable challenges—terrain and weather that make flying inherently risky. But layered on top of those natural hazards are choices: to operate aging aircraft without modern safety equipment, to maintain a regulatory structure that prioritizes institutional convenience over passenger safety, to allow political interests to block reforms that every international aviation body has deemed necessary. The mountains will always be there. The weather will always be unpredictable. But the other failures—the ones rooted in neglect, in conflict of interest, in the unwillingness to act—those are not inevitable. They are decisions, made year after year, with consequences that are measured in lives.