Kathmandu, January 12The publication of the inquest report on the crash of Yeti Airlines Flight NYT691, en-route to Pokhara's new airport, may have unshrouded the cloak of secrecy on what happened in the morning of 15th January 2023.

The fatal crash resulted in the instantaneous deaths of 72 persons on-board, including the Yeti Airline's crew. Genocide case against Israel: Where does the rest of the world stand on the momentous allegations? Human error blamed for Yeti Airline plane crash, according to Report Raising questions over the capabilities of the investigators, the experts who reviewed the report content shared some interesting insights with this daily.

According to the experts, the report, however, replete with obfuscation and even glaring factual inaccuracies.

For instance, it states that no infants were on-board, contrary to the facts that the 15-month-old daughter of doctor couple Sushil and Sona Shrestha had also perished in the disaster, has unfortunately eroded the investigation commission's credibility.

Why the investigation commission chose not to have any quality control mechanism during the preparation of the report is anybody's guess, observers say.The Investigation Commission, coordinated by former tourism secretary Nagendra Prasad Ghimire with Joint Secretary Buddhi Sagar Lamichhane, submitted its findings to Sudan Kirati, the Minister for Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation on December 28. A review of quality investigation reports produced by world-renowned agencies like NTSB, AAIB, ATSB, however, show the seasoned investigators dive into the organizational practices at the operator, especially, the flight crew training practices.

The performance of the flight crew depends on the quality of trainings imparted by the operator's training unit in flights as well as simulators.

This is rather important as ICAO standards mandate the training program of the operator has to be vetted by the regulator's inspectors, in this case the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal.

Clearly any oversight by the inspectors in the approval process will result in flawed training being imparted to the flight crew who operate the aircraft.The analysis section of the 73-page report mentions that mid-flight the instructor pilot Captain Kamal KC expressed his intention to familiarize the other co-pilot with landing on Runway 12 and went ahead with the activity.

"Clearly, familiarization activity is a training activity and should have been planned in advance and performed on a non-revenue flight so as not to imperil the lives of the fare-paying passengers.

However, even if the commission chose to gloss over this criminal act, it wouldn't remain unnoticed by the world's aviation community," observers confided.The report volume has been mostly populated with the description of the post-crash analysis at the facilities abroad while discussing little about the prevailing culture in Nepali aviation.

"Clearly, Nepal air operators' culture of getting away with flight crew training on passenger flights has contributed to this disaster and yet found no place in this supposedly academic piece," an aviation analyst said.Alas, the commission members, under no obligation of being fair, objective and accountable to the dead, seem to have focused on enjoying the foreign trips in the name of this inquiry as observers but have actually contributed little to the contents.

"No wonder, poor air accident investigation continues to plague Nepali aviation and resulting in unabated air crashes." .

This article first appeared/also appeared in https://thehimalayantimes.com