It’s Maghe Sakranti today - a day of festivities for different communities around Nepal. The first of Magh heralds the beginning of the end of winter - a time for families to come together to enjoy tarul, phulaura, murai ko laduu under the balmy January sun.
But, for those who lost their loved ones in the tragic Yeti Air plane crash in Pokhara this morning, Maghe Sakranti will no longer be a day for celebration. As families waited with dread, details about the crash began trickling out. First to come were the horrifying images and videos of the plumes of black smoke swirling over the Seti gorge, the crash site, followed by the release of the names of the passengers and crew.
This horrific tragedy has once again put to question the role and the nature of the Civil Aviation Authority. Despite demands for the Civil Aviation Authority to be restructured, it still “performs a dual function as regulator and service provider”.
Does this make sense? How can an authority, on one hand, act as a profit-seeking entity, and at the same time be the entity that is responsible for regulating profit-making entities, i.e., domestic airlines, airports, etc?
The cynic within us kind of knows what is going to happen in the aftermath of this tragedy. Because this is not the first time.
Editorials demanding more from the regulatory body on aviation safety will be published, Nepal’s skies will be listed as the most challenging in international media, international aviation regulators will once again refuse to take Nepali airlines off their blacklist, and as always, investigation committees will be formed to look into the crash.
The last one happened less than eight months ago, on a Jomsom-bound Tara Air flight from Pokhara in May 2022. Tara Air is also a subsidiary of Yeti Airlines. According to Nepali Times, the Tara Air plane that crashed last year was 43 years old. And, more than a month after the crash, the Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation came under criticism for not publishing the preliminary report on the accident within the standard 30 days. When we checked the ministry’s website on Sunday, it didn’t have any report about the Tara Air crash alongside published reports of other recent accidents.
Today’s crash might be Nepal’s deadliest domestic tragedy in decades. At the time of this writing, 68 people on-board have been confirmed to have died, according to officials. The Aviation Safety Database, which documents airplane crashes, has listed 68 crashes in Nepal, including today’s fatal accident, since 1946. Among those accidents, 35 of them took place after the year 2000. And yet, the inept workings of the regulatory entity CAAN and the way private airlines continue to operate without being held accountable in the country can only be understood as a flagrant disregard for safety.
Lives Lost on the Road
Every year, dozens of road accidents claim the lives of countless Nepalis, many of which don’t receive wide media coverage. Despite questions being raised constantly about the state of transport safety, the government bodies and the private transport operators have done little to show their commitment towards prioritizing the safety of passengers over profit.
Last year, in road accidents alone, nearly 3000 people were killed, and over 7000 were severely injured. According to an in-depth story about road fatalities in the Nepali Times, “more people die on Nepal's highways every year than in all natural disasters combined.”
These repeated tragedies are yet another glaring example of how the Nepali state has failed to protect the lives of its citizens, and that our safety, on road, or in the skies has never been a priority for our leaders.
Rarely are programs and policies formulated to address road fatalities - the same roads where millions of rupees are spent in the name of development, and often come at an environmental cost. Yes, there are promises, and committee after committee, following tragedies on the road and our skies, that things will get better - in fact, the ‘common minimum program’ released just last week by our mili juli sarkaar listed road safety as a priority. But, when will things get better? And how?
The heartbreaking news of the crash has stunned Nepalis everywhere. And this isn’t the first time we’ve found ourselves in such a situation. Questions are being raised, once again, about mechanisms in place to check whether airline companies like Yeti, which has had two major air crashes in the last eight months, meet the necessary safety standards to operate, and whether the regulatory body CAAN, has done anything substantial in the last two decades to ensure the safety of passengers.
Like in the past, when the news cycle moves from this tragedy to the next, these pressing concerns about transport safety will be buried again, under empty symbolic gestures such as the formation of committees, or, a public holiday marked as a day of mourning.
But, those who are responsible for working towards avoiding such tragedies should know that for the families who have lost their loved ones, the mourning will probably last a lifetime.