I was talking to my sister, who was reclining on a comfortable couch when she broke out to me that the Yeti Airlines Flight 691 had crashed in Pokhara. I had a sense of hopeless resignation about the aviation sector then, "Doesn't amaze me". Given how bad the state of affairs is, I thought, "Aren't the crash rates low. I wouldn't be surprised if another plane plummeted". Pessimism galore.
And in the months past this terrible tragedy, we saw a number of helicopter crashes- the most notable of them being the one which took off from Lukla and was headed to Kathmandu. One might as well argue and say that the ex-Chilean president Sebastian Pinera lost his life due to a helicopter mishap yesterday, Kobe Bryant, the giant (not simply in Basketballing terms), crashed in a helicopter too. In light of such things, one shouldn't try to paint Nepalese aviation as "unsafe" in its entirety.
When I talked to the brilliant contrarian of a pilot Kumar Pandey, he confided to me in one of my podcasts that "ATR 72 was a bird which shouldn't have gone down". If there is someone as respectable as that pronounces who it so, a drifter like me has nothing to riposte. I could be banging about how the Pokhara International Airport shouldn't have been built when there wasn't a clear vision to operate it well or that the possibility of a bird strike always lurks around the area or things of that kind but doesn't quite answer or pose a significant resistance to why the "ATR 72" shouldn't have downed.
Watching the video shot by an Indian traveler who lost his life on Flight 691 was something more than a bone-chiller, it was a bone and flesh crawler. And so was the video shot by a lady who thought she was innocuously filming an aircraft gliding close over her house's airspace, only to lose control over her device- though not with the horridness of the officers who were in charge of the aircraft.
Kumar had also told me that the report would be out when talking about the crash would have been so banal that there would virtually be no interest around it- people would forget the incident like some gossip of the yesteryears, and adding to it would be white noise. And he was right on this count as well.
Swedes have a brilliant word for the entangled feelings of fear and excitement before a journey begins, called "resfeber". I would say that when I am taking a plane in our country, the feeling becomes too lopsided towards "fear" and less inclined to "excitement". As the plane touches down, I say, "Ahh.. I've got another day to live". When I asked the Joint Secretary of our nation and a member of the investigation committee of the crash Buddhi Sagar Lamichhane, whether he felt like I did, he said he wasn't fear-ridden while taking a flight. He took, first a flight, second a helicopter to begin his services to the Nepalese government. And I thought, "There's a touch of destiny about this man".

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