Tara Air

Is Tara Air safe?

It has one of the weakest records of any airline we cover. Tara Air, the mountain arm of the Yeti Airlines group, flies Twin Otters to short airstrips in the Himalayas, and since 2010 three of them have crashed into terrain, killing all 67 people on board. The last crash, on the Pokhara–Jomsom route in May 2022, happened with the aircraft's terrain warning system switched off. Like every Nepali airline it is on the EU Air Safety ListEU Air Safety ListThe European Commission's list of airlines banned or restricted from flying in EU airspace because they do not meet international safety standards.More in the glossary, and it has no IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary audit. We score it 27, below its parent Yeti Airlines (47).

That score partly reflects where it flies. Lukla, Jomsom, Simikot and Dolpa are among the most demanding airports anywhere, and other airlines have crashed on the same routes. But the investigators' reports on Tara's own crashes describe crew decisions, ignored warnings and a disabled warning system, not only hard terrain.

Three crashes, one pattern

• Okhaldhunga, 15 December 2010. A Twin Otter left Lamidanda for Kathmandu with 22 people on board and hit Palunge hill. Nobody survived.
• Dana, 24 February 2016. Flight 193, a Series 400 Twin Otter only a year old, was on the 20-minute hop from Pokhara to Jomsom. It deviated from its track and climbed to avoid cloud, then flew through cloud with little visibility. When the ground proximity warning sounded, the captain told his co-pilot not to worry about it: he was used to hearing it in normal flight. The aircraft hit a mountainside at about 10,700 feet, killing all 23. The investigators found that the crew repeatedly entered cloud on a flight that was meant to be flown by sight.
• Sanosare, 29 May 2022. Flight 197, a 1979 Twin Otter, was the first Tara flight of the day to Jomsom, delayed for hours by cloud over the pass. The voice recorder showed that the captain was hesitant and that someone, a member of the ground staff or a passenger close to the crew, urged him strongly to go. In cloud, with the terrain warning system inhibited, the aircraft hit rock at about 4,050 metres. All 22 died.

Why the terrain warning was off

The 2022 report is the most damaging. The aircraft's terrain warning system was set up to use GPS altitude, but a configuration error meant it received none, and its back-up altitude had not been calibrated, so on earlier flights it was off by 73 to 866 feet. The result was a stream of false alerts, and the system was inhibited. The commission listed the crew's failure to follow the airline's procedures, the switched-off system, a less experienced co-pilot with a large gap in seniority, poor crew coordination and the captain doing both pilots' jobs. It made ten safety recommendations.

The 2016 and 2022 reports describe the same weakness six years apart: crews flying in cloud near terrain without a warning system they trusted.

Other accidents

Three more Twin Otters were damaged badly enough to count as accidents. One lost directional control on take-off at Dolpa in September 2012 and hit the fence. One left the runway at Simikot in November 2017 after a reported tyre burst, injuring four. One bounced several times on landing at Jumla in June 2018, ran off the side and its nose gear collapsed. Nobody died, but six accidents in 12 years on a fleet of a few aircraft is a weak record even for these airstrips. Outside the accident list, AeroInside reports a Tara Dornier 228 that veered off the runway at Ramechhap in April 2019 after a diversion from Lukla, and a burst tyre on landing at Bajura in December 2021.

Oversight

The Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal regulates the airlines and also runs the airports, a conflict ICAO has raised since 2009. ICAO's 2022 audit gave Nepal 70.1% effective implementationICAO USOAPICAO's audit of how well each country's aviation regulator oversees safety. The result is an "effective implementation" percentage.More in the glossary. Bills to split CAAN were registered in parliament on 2 October 2026. The EU has banned every Nepali airline since 2013, and its June 2026 list still names Tara Air. Tara is not an IATA member, so there is no IOSAIOSAThe IATA Operational Safety Audit, an international audit of an airline's safety management and operations. Every IATA member must pass it.More in the glossary audit.

What it flies

Tara Air publishes no fleet list. The aircraft in its accident records are de Havilland Canada Twin Otters, 300-series machines built from 1975 to 1984 and one Series 400 built in 2015. The Twin Otter is the standard aircraft for these strips and is robust, but the design is from the 1960s, and most of the older aircraft have no modern cockpit. Tara has also flown Dornier 228s in the past.

If you need to fly to Lukla or Jomsom

• Take the first flight of the morning. The 2016 and 2022 crashes both happened on Jomsom flights after cloud had built in the valleys.
• Build in spare days. Delays of a day or more are common, and a schedule with no slack creates exactly the pressure the 2022 report described.
• Never urge a pilot to go. If the crew hesitates, back them. Consider the road or a trek for Jomsom, and compare the other airlines on the route, such as Summit Air and Nepal Airlines, knowing that none has a strong record on mountain strips.

How we scored it

The accident record (15) is the lowest factor: three fatal crashes into terrain since 2010 on a very small fleet. The environment (15) reflects a network made almost entirely of mountain strips. Oversight (25) is the same as for every Nepali airline, and the fleet (45) is all Twin Otters, many decades old. Serious incidents (50) cover the 2019 Ramechhap excursion and the 2021 burst tyre; Nepal publishes too few reports for us to read that short list as clean.