Video of the Nepal plane crash shows the aircraft's final seconds. Here's what aviation experts have to say about it
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Diwas Bohora was sitting on the terrace at his home in the Nepalese tourist city of Pokhara when he noticed a plane approaching the airport at low altitude.
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He began filming, not knowing what he was about to capture on his phone.
Almost immediately after he hit the record button, something went horribly wrong — the plane crashed into a ravine nearby.
Investigators are expected to hand down a report on the crash within 45 days, but aviation experts have drawn early conclusions based on Bohora's footage
As the twin-engine ATR 72 was approaching Pokhara Airport, it "cruised at 12,500 feet and was on a normal descent" before the crash, an airport spokesperson said.
Officials say none of the 72 people on board survived.
Searchers have found both the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, which is commonly known as a black box, but haven't given any details to what the devices show.
Some footage taken by passengers inside the plane has also surfaced online.
Neil Hansford, an aviation consultant from Strategic Aviation Solutions, said the black box was typically the first point of call when seeking information about plane crashes that occurred in remote areas.
"Generally, that's the only thing you've got," he said.
But because the Pokhara crash happened in view of so many witnesses, there's more insight into what happened.
"Everybody could see this," Mr Hansford said.
"There's so much footage, you start to come to a very quick solution."
Khum Bahadur Chhetri, a local resident, said he watched from the roof of his house as the crash unfolded.
"I saw the plane trembling, moving left and right, and then suddenly it nosedived and it went into the gorge," he said.
Mr Bohora's footage showed the plane flying low before the footage cut out.
"The plane suddenly tilts, just like a fighter plane tilts to dodge a missile," he said.
"I saw that and I was shocked that it's surely going to come towards our homes."
The plane appeared to be making a normal approach but, within a matter of seconds, it crashed.
"It would have been very quick for [the passengers] and for the pilot," Mr Hansford said.
"I think this one is going to get down to what's called a stall," Mr Hansford said.
"[The pilot had] been coming in too slow.
"As soon as you bank to the left, then obviously you lose all the wind lift and it goes down like a stone.
"Once you get into a stall at low altitude and low speed, there's generally only one consequence."
He said the aircraft would have given the pilot stall warnings, and he believed the crash was due to human error.
"When you're at low speed, you don't start making heavily banked turns," he said.
"I think [the pilot's] level of competence had been reached."
James Nixon, a retired A380 captain, said flight recorders would provide greater clarity about what happened inside the cockpit.
Investigators will use the device to "find out why this most senior captain allowed the speed to decay on the approach and for the wing to stall," he said.
"Because when you stall an aircraft, it's no longer [an] aircraft, it's like a grand piano dropped out of a tall building."
Mr Hansford said from the videos he had seen, there appeared to be clear skies at the time of the crash so low visibility did not appear to be a factor.
Based on the size of the blaze that followed the crash, he also didn't believe the plane was low on fuel.
"The aircraft's highly reliable," Mr Hansford said.
"This is their basic stock in trade, doing these sorts of short routes."
He said there were two runways at the airport — the new international one and the traditional domestic runway.
"I don't know what runway [the plane] was approaching," he said.
"We have to assume it was the old domestic one … this was a domestic flight."
Mountainous terrain and sudden weather changes make Nepal a dangerous place to fly, experts say.
"The weather changes so quickly up there so you can lose visibility," Mr Hansford said
"Obviously when you've got those mountains, the clouds start to clamp down.
"The Nepalese authorities don't have very good weather forecasting for aviation."
Mr Nixon said certain Nepalese airports were difficult to land in.
"There are airports where you have to be specially qualified on that airport to go in and out of there," he said.
"So I flew for 31 years but I wasn't good enough to fly in there.
"So you have to do really special training to fly in and out of these tricky airports because of these winds. It just moves around all the time."
The European Union has banned another Nepalese airline, Nepali Airlines, from its airspace since 2013, citing safety concerns.
This is Nepal's deadliest plane crash since 1992, when a Pakistan International Airlines Airbus A300 crashed into a hillside on approach to Kathmandu, killing all 167 people on board.
Nearly 350 people have died in plane or helicopter crashes in Nepal since 2000.
Here's a timeline of those crashes, compiled by Reuters News Agency with one entry added by the ABC:
ABC/Reuters
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