Lack of en-route weather info affects flights in Karnali

By A Staff Reporter Kathmandu, June 3: No flights have taken off from Nepalgunj for the mountainous districts of Karnali for two days. 

A lack of en-route weather details has prevented the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN) from issuing permits to planes flying from Nepalgunj to high-altitude airports in Karnali. This has stopped all flights to Simkot, said Mohan Giri, chief of CAAN’s Simkot office.

“CAAN has not given airlines permission to fly to Humla due to lack of weather information in Kalikot and Dailekh areas,” he said. “Although the weather here has been favourable since Wednesday, planes have not been able to fly because of this.”

Tara Air said that passengers, boarding passes in hand, had been coming to Simkot Airport for the past two days, waiting till late afternoon and returning disappointed.

This halting of flights has especially affected passengers in Humla because the district is not connected to the rest of the country by road. 

Airline companies operate flights to Humla, Jumla, Mugu and Dolpa from Nepalgunj. However, Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) does not issue weather bulletins for these districts which creates problems for flights.

Following the Tara Air crash earlier this week that killed 22 people, CAAN has decided not to allow domestic flights to operate in bad weather. It now only permits planes flying under the visual flight rules (VFR) system to take off if the entire en-route weather is clear. Earlier, aircrafts only needed clear weather at their source and destination airports to be allowed to fly.

The Federal Aviation Authority of the United States of America defines the en route phase of a flight as the segment from the termination point of a departure procedure to the origination point of an arrival procedure.

CAAN had said that it would depend on the en-route weather forecast provided by the DHM to issue permits. However, the Department has now stated that it will not be able to provide them.

Issuing a notice on Thursday, DHM clarified that it does not have the human and technical resources necessary to inform CAAN about the en-route weather on a continuous basis.

(With inputs from Humla correspondent Rajan Rawat).