It is very sad to learn about missing helicopter and 24 people on board on the mission of WWF. Some of them are well known to me. Let's prey for their safe return home!



Helicopter with 24 passengers including Minister Rai, WWF officials missing

By DHARMA POUDEL
(Kantipuronline.com)

TAPLEJUNG, Sept 23 - A Shree Airlines helicopter bound for Suketar from Ghunsa, Taplejung, with 24 passengers on board, went missing since Saturday morning.

Chief District Officer of Taplejung district, Hem Nath Dawadi said that the 9AN helicopter had gone out of contact this morning at around 9 while returning to Suketar from Ghunsa.

According to Dawadi, State Minister for Forest, Gopal Rai, some media persons are among those who were onboard on the missing chopper.

Minister Rai and media persons including officials from the World Wild Life Fund (WWF) had reached Taplejung to attend a function to mark the handing over of the Kanchanjunga Conservation Area to the local community.

Others on board include: Pauli Mustonen, Charge d'affaires at the Embassy of Finland, Dr. Harka Gurung, Mohan Prasad Wagle of Forest Ministry, Dr. Bijanan Acharya of USAID, Dr Jill Bowling, conservation director of WWF-UK, Dr Tirtha Man Maskey, vice-president of Asian Rhino Conservation Department, Dr. Chandra Prasad Gurung of WWF-Nepal, Dr Damodar Prasad Parajuli, acting secretary at the Ministry of Forest, Sharad Rai, director general of Department of Forest, Narayan Poudel, director general of Department of National Park and Wildlife Conservation, Margaret Alexander of USAID, Mingma Nurbu Sherpa of WWF-US, Jennifer Headley, WWF UK Coordinator, Eastern Himalayas, Hem Raj Bhandari and Sunil Singh of Nepal Television, AC Lama, senior programme officer of WWF Nepal, Matthew Preece, Bijay Kumar Shrestha of FNCCI, Dawa Tsering Sherpa of Kanchanjungha Conservation Area, and four crew members that include Captain Klim Kim, Saffron Vallery, Tandu Shrestha, pilot Migma Tsering Sherpa.

Two helicopters of the Nepal Army have been dispatched to carry out the search operation, officials at the Rescue Coordination at TIA said.

However, due to the "deteriorating" weather condition in the areas, rescue operation have been affected, the officials added.

Local Sherpas from Ghunsa told the authorities at Taplejung that the helicopter had taken off at 11: 30 this morning and soon after which they heard a loud noise.

From Nepal 1's Field Report (Live telephone report by Anand Gautam):

- Found crash site
- All people on board dead.
- The problem now is how to ferry the dead bodies
- It is hard identify the bodies


IT IS INDEED VERY HARD TO EXPRESS THE LOSS OF INVALUABLE LIVES.

I PRAY GOD FOR THE PEACE OF DEPARTED SOULS.

Its a very very sad news. An irrepairable loss.

God bless the departed souls.

What a tragic moment on the auspicious occasion of Dashain.

May the soul of all passengers rest in peace....

Very Sad News...!!!

Margaret Alexander, the deputy dir. of USAID in Nepal, had many friends in the U.S. and, indeed, all over the world. We are devastated.

This is a tragedy that hits very close to my heart. One of the dead was a dear and old family friend of ours - Minga dai. You could not find a more gentle human being in the world. A great loss to Nepal and even greater loss to Humanity!

LP

A big loss for the Country.......People like Hark Gurung and Tirtha Maskey were country's pride. Very sad to hear this news.
Visibility nahuda nahudai kin udaunu paryo,I dont understand??

Very Tragic News..
May all the departed soul lost in this tragic accident rest in peace.

Besides personal speculation and assumptions, has anyone come across any reports in the media that provides information about the weather condition *at the time of take-off* ?

I have seen in nepal, the pilot of private airlines usually take risk even in bad weather....

this is very sad news...

Great loss to the conservation community not only in Nepal but also in the world. I personally knew at least 8 individuals. Like many others, I am devastated.

May your soul rest in everlasting peace

A single death is an enormous tragedy, but a unit of this rank and reputation succumbing to such misfortune must not have a word in the Lexicon. Environmental science, in which many of these people dedicated their lives to, is a science of passion and altruism. We owe them for supplementing their work of hobby, by means of education, talent and dedication. It is the ultimate irony of faith, that, these individuals who spent most of their lives preserving the lives of the living and that of inanimate, departed as “one of the 24 dead.” They certainly deserved better. May our gratitude and respect ease their soul rest in peace.

It is sad indeed! At least they have found the crash site. Actually the area is very rugged terrain with very steep steep slopes. Surprisingly unlike in other parts of Nepal even the steep slopes retain a lot of moisture and as a result good growth of vegetation (nigalo, white rhododendrons at high altitudes and red rododendrones at lower slopes. Perhaps, this is the region of Nepal where the precipitation amounts to be the highest. This region has the most densely preserved Rain forest of whole Nepal. Villages are not easy to locate and are found at great distances on higher places connected by few the main trails. Valley bottom are not usually accessible. If you are off the trail then it is easy to get lost. If you are lost then you may die of starvation. This is exactly what happened to my group (four of us). After struggling along the steep slopes just like monkey to find the right trail almost for whole day until we came across this (see in the picture) what appears to be “go-tha-lo ko bato” . There were no crisscross trails like in other places. We were so tired and hungry and we were lucky to find this trail. This trail took us to the main trail and we survived. I have posted this picture just to give you an idea about the area.

may their soul rest in peace

Nepal government must think to establish control quality and capacity, ban of old expire aircrafts as well as requires maintenance.

This function of body must act like giving air transpiration permits, grounding, eliminating and persecuting to private air transpiration companies.

Otherwise, Nepal was facing air accident disasters in past, present and future, too.

In Nepal, couple rich people invest money and take bank loans to open air Transportation Company. This company bought cheap old expire Russian aircraft and helicopter which is considerably "Junk". They fix little bit and these companies use these junk aircrafts in Nepal.

I would suggest that Nepali government must seriously control junk aircraft from overseas or must setup standard for quality control. Law and regulation must establish for this purpose.

Therefore we had lots of air accidents, valuable people dies like this.

This is not only.... Almost every 4 months Nepal faces air accidents.

Compared to previous years, Nepalese aviation has a good progress in aviation safety. I think there are strict rules and regulations in force. Despite this, accidents are occurring.
One major factor is the human error for these terrain related accidents. The fragile topography also makes it challenging for pilots flying under VFR, especially in bad weather conditions.
There are multi factors ..................

may the intelluctuals soul rest in peace..

A similar chopper of shree airlines crashed at Everest base camp in June 2005 when it had gone to bring back the nepal rotary everest expedition team members. Fortunately, it happened while it was trying to balance its tail during landing, which hit one side of the mountain and all aboard were able to get out on time. no explosion took place, but the chopper remains in the EBC till this date...i believe.
So, this is probably not the first time that shree airline chopper has run into problem. i just hope that the investigation team formed under the chairmanship of hon. judge Keshari pandit will uncover the truth behind the incidents and take necessary actions to prevent any such great mishaps in future and punish the culprits - if any. This much the departed souls deserve! Om shanti!

A great loss for Nepal and for all the ecology conservationists around the world. Condonlences to all their families and may their souls RIP.

BTW, I had the chance of meeting up with Dr. Harka Gurung a long long time ago (his sons are friends of mine) and since then I held a high amount of reverence for this man not only for what he had done for Nepal (academically) but also for the empowerment of Nepal's "matwalis". His book, "Vignettes of Nepal" was my favorite read at the library during my days at St. Paul's. And what Kanak Dixit said couldn't have been more appropriate: "Harka Gurung, the Nepali who introduced Nepal to Nepalis." (He certainly did for me through his "Vignettes..." book).

To lose a man posessing such principles and values as Dr. Gurung did, is an irreplaceable loss to Nepalis everywhere...My sincerest condolences to his family left behind and I also bereave with all of Nepal's indigeous groups. He will be missed greatly.

I can't wait for the investigation into Shree Airlines begin and all parties held liable punished to the fullest extent of the law.



http://www.nepalitimes.com/issue/317/Remembrance/12572.


Dr. Gurung
A Tribute by Kanak Mani Dixit

A helicopter hits a mountainside, and wipes out an entire pantheon of Nepal’s best and brightest, who believed in returning the commons to the people. These professionals, who, along with some equally committed foreign friends, were returning to Kathmandu having handed over the management of the Kangchenjunga Conservation Area to the local inhabitants. They were the gift of the central Himalaya, of Nepal, to the world. Each was a life full of creativity, courage, and Himalayan exhilaration, and will be remembered decades hence for how they helped define Nepal’s future on the foundation of natural science, geography, and respect for people.

Seated in that helicopter was Harka Gurung, the Nepali who introduced Nepal to Nepalis. He was born in 1938 fast by the Ngadi Khola in upper Lamjung. Growing up at a time when Kathmandu Valley was ‘Nepal’, he decided to reject the ancestral call of Gurkha warriorship, and chose instead the path of scholarship. He ran away barefoot to Kathmandu, where he joined Darbar High School. Then it was onward to ‘lain chhokra’ schools in India, an IA back at Tri Chandra College, a Bachelor’s from Patna University—and a PhD on the geography of Pokhara Valley from Edinburgh University in 1965.

That was a time, so soon after the eclipse of the Ranas, when Nepalis of ‘ethnicity’ were near-invisible on the national scene. Those outside the country, descendants of migrants, were able to rise to the level of their genius; within Nepal, however, Kathmandu’s autocratic glass ceiling allowed no exception. It was by dint of his personality and steely determination, his rigour and love of learning, that Dr Gurung became a one-man role model and pillar of strength for the rest of emerging Nepal.

His first calling was geography, but Dr Gurung was a multi-tasking multi-disciplinarian who delved into planning, demography, art (under Bal Krishna Sama), history (of mountaineering, hill migration, Gurkha recruitment), economics—and, most recently, transparency in governance. He was once Minister of Tourism, in the middle of the Panchayat era, and we have never had someone in that position who better understood the country’s cultural and natural wealth. Over the past decade, amidst the tide of righteous ethnic assertion, Dr Gurung was an exemplar, himself intensely concerned about overturning the national legacy of exclusion.

Dr Gurung had the stature and learning that allowed him not to be cowed by possibility of controversy. In 1983, he was pilloried for a report on migration that suggested regulation of the southern border. Last year, ICIMOD published a detailed monograph with four decades worth of photographic evidence from his native Lamjung. In it, Dr Gurung sought to debunk the ‘theory of Himalayan degradation’, which seeks to place the blame for downstream siltation and flooding at the doorstep of the midhill peasantry and its supposed biomass profligacy.

Ever the genial contrarian, Dr Gurung scoffed at the tradition, powered by the myth that it was a holy mountain, of not allowing mountaineers on Machapuchre. He maintained that there was no evidence the Gurung herders inhabiting its base in fact revered Machapuchre. A student of mountaineering history, he suggested that the first climbers of Nepal were not the Sherpas but Gurkha lahurays, starting with Karbir Budathoki and Harkabir Thapa in the Swiss Alps in 1884.

Dr Gurung believed in the power of statistics to reveal and thereby help improve the human condition, and so his latest immersion was in producing the book Nepal: Atlas and Statistics. A large-format work in preparation for three full years, it emerged from the printers the day before the author and editor left for Ghunsa at the base of Kangchenjunga. Himal Books, the publishers, was preparing for a grand presentation by Dr Gurung after the Dasain break. It will now have to be done in absentia.

Author of the widely-acclaimed Vignettes of Nepal (1980), among more than a dozen equally gripping and authoritative works, Dr Gurung’s life cannot be encapsulated other than through vignettes. One of his most prized possessions was a set of black-and-white photographs following the march of the Himalayan ramparts, taken from a Pilatus Porter flight that he took across the 500-mile spine of Nepal.

When it came time to christen scores of the country’s peaks so that they did not all get named by western climbers and cartographers, and alternatively to save them from the fate of mere numericals, it was Dr Gurung who was handed the task. That was also how Peak 29, towering above his home village in central Nepal, became Ngadi Chuli. Across the Nepal Himalaya, thus Harka Gurung left his personal stamp on the chulis, and it was amidst the craggy cliffs of the lower Himalaya, in Taplejung in the east, that he himself returned to nature.

Coming down from Manang a few years ago, and passing Ngadi Khola, a porter pointed out to me a collection of houses up the slope to the left. He said, “That one, with the kitchen smoke, is the house of Harka Gurung.” It is by that wisp of smoke in his beloved Ngadi that I prefer to remember Dr Gurung.

Sad, How many days it took them just to bring the bodies out