Plane missing in western Nepal with 18 on board

            

                             

A plane with 18 people on board has gone missing in western Nepal.

Contact with the Nepal Airlines plane was lost a few minutes after it took off from the town of Pokhara, bound for Jumla, around 360km (220 miles) west of the capital Kathmandu, officials said.

Fifteen passengers - reportedly including a child- and three crew members were on board the aircraft.

Critics say that many passenger aircraft in Nepal are often poorly maintained.

The Twin Otter plane went missing shortly after it took off at 12:40 local time (06:55 GMT), Nepal Airlines spokesman Ram Hari Sharma told the BBC.

One of the passengers is believed to be a foreign national.

Bimlesh Lal Karna, an official with the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal who was coordinating rescue efforts, said two rescue helicopters have been sent to the area, but they have not been not been able to trace the plane.

He said that search efforts were being hampered by bad weather.

Poor record

In December the EU put all of Nepal's airlines on a blacklist, citing safety fears.

In September 2012, a plane operated by Nepal's Sita Air crashed near Kathmandu airport, killing 19 people.

In May of that year 15 people died when an Agni Air plane carrying Indian pilgrims to a Hindu religious site in northern Nepal crashed at a high-altitude airport.

Since 1949 - the year the first aircraft landed in Nepal - there have been more than 70 different crashes involving planes and helicopters, in which more than 700 people have been killed.