Nepalese Private Airline With 69 Passengers Lands In Wrong City, Over 250 Kms Away From Destination

In a rather bizarre turn of events, 69 passengers travelling on Buddha Air, a private airline in Nepal ended up in a different city than where they were supposed to fly to.

The incident that happened last week only surfaced a few days ago.

According to local media, flight Buddha Air's flight U4505 was on its way to Janakpur from Kathmandu's Tribhuvan International Airport on Friday.


But the flight ended up in Pokhara, 255 kilometres away from the actual destination.


According to reports, the flight mix-up happened due to bad weather.

The weather was not quite favourable for the flights on Friday so carriers were making use of every available weather window to take the passengers on board as quickly as possible and take off

When it took off, it had already been delayed. But when it landed, it actually landed in Pokhara instead of the destination airport.

According to the preliminary report, due to weather issues, flights to Pokhara were permitted until 3 pm under the visual flight rules(VFR).

The VFR is a set of regulations under which a pilot operates an aircraft in weather conditions generally clear enough to allow the pilot to see where the aircraft is going.


“The weather was already causing flight delays and to make up for the flying time, Buddha Air officials decided to fly to Pokhara first,” said an official at the airline company.


Accordingly, the flight number was changed and the mix-up happened.

Buddha Air admitted to serious lapses on its side, the report said. Birendra Bahadur Basnet, Managing Director of the carrier, told local media that they have formed a committee to investigate the incident.

“The difference in flight schedule between Janakpur and Pokhara was 15 to 20 minutes,” said an official.

“The ground staff transferred [on paper] 69 passengers of flight U4505 to flight U4607 which actually was cleared for Pokhara by the air traffic controllers,” said the official.


Everything was in the right order but the ground staff and the flight attendant failed to brief the flight's captain and co-pilot that the flight's number had been changed, according to the official.

“The flight attendant did make an announcement on the flight that it was heading to Janakpur,” said the official.

“There was a miscommunication between the ground staff and the pilots,” said the official. “The flying pilots also did not look at the passengers' manifest.”

Aviation experts say such incidents may happen, but they happen quite rarely.

Tri Ratna Manandhar, a former director-general of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, said this is the second incident of such kind in Nepal's aviation history in the last two and a half-decades.