Plane skids off runway in Nepal

Kathmandu: A domestic aircraft skidded off the recently repaired runway of Nepal’s international airport, halting all the flights for some 12-hours that left thousands of people stranded, officials said on Sunday.
The Tribhuvan International Airport was closed after a Yeti Airlines aircraft skidded off its runway on Saturday night, the Kathmandu Post reported.
The Jetstream 41 was carrying 21 passengers from Nepalgunj to Kathmandu. The incident disrupted all airport services, including international flights.
However, no human casualty has been reported, the report said, adding that the airport resumed its normal operations on Sunday, 12-hours after the incident.
The incident comes amid mounting safety concerns over cracks on the runway’s surface, which was repaired only recently.
The latest incident is one of the many plane accidents that Nepal’s airport has witnessed in recent years. In March, a Dhaka to Kathmandu US-Bangla Airlines flight, with 67 passengers and four crew members on board, caught fire after it careened off the runway and ploughed into a football ground near the airport, killing 51 people.
In April, all 139 people on board a Malaysian passenger plane had a miraculous escape when the Kuala Lumpur-bound flight skidded off the runway and got stuck in mud while attempting to take off from the airport.
Nepal’s only international airport lies in a narrow bowl-shaped valley with the Himalayas to the north, making it a challenging place to land. (PTI)