Yeti Airlines Flight 678 took off from Pokhara at 11.50AM on 25 April for Kathmandu. The 45 passengers and crew were settling down for a routine half-hour flight. About five minutes after takeoff, Captain Lawis Chand contacted the control tower at Pokhara Airport but did not get any response.
After multiple attempts, he finally heard someone shouting “Earthquake, earthquake” into the radio. Pokhara tower told Chand to fly on to Kathmandu since the city had been hit by an earthquake. By this time, the Yeti Jetstream 41 turboprop was flying at 11,500 ft above the epicenter of the quake in Gorkha.
Chand flew on and radioed ahead to Kathmandu. No response. The plane descended into Kathmandu Valley and from the cockpit Chand could see the whole city enveloped in a cloud of dust. He tried to radio the tower in Bhairahawa, his alternative airport, without success. Finally Kathmandu Tower came on air, but couldn’t give clear instructions to the pilots about whether they could land or not. The plane was running low on fuel.
Finally a Simrik Air helicopter got air borne to make an inspection of the runway. The pilot said the runway looked all right. Capt Chand decided to land his plane at his own risk. “We knew there was a danger, but there was no other option,” he told us.
By this time, another Yeti airlines flight from Biratnagar was approaching Kathmandu from the east, and was having similar problems getting instructions from the tower, which was swaying so much that equipment had been thrown off tables and air traffic controllers had abandoned their positions. Capt Sabina Shrestha (pic) assumed it was a radio glitch and continued on to Kathmandu.
“From the cockpit it looked like Bhaktapur had been destroyed,” Capt Shrestha said, and the crew worried about their families in the city below. “After I saw that there was no Dharahara I knew it was a big one.”
She circled for 45 minutes above the airport, and looked down at people running out on to the apron for safety. “The airport looked very chaotic,” she recalled.
Capt Shrestha was in radio contact with her Yeti Airlines colleague Capt Chand in the other flight, and landed her plane right before his.
Read also:
The earthquake from above, Kunda Dixit
Sabina’s world