Flights towards high hilly districts in Karnali Province have been disrupted for the past few days.
Tara Air, Summit Air and Sita Air, the airline companies providing regular services to Humla, Mugu, Jumla and Dolpa have diverted their flights services to the eastern districts, causing inconveniences to the people of the remote districts in Karnali.
Though people of southern Humla have access to motor services for out-district travel, the people of Sarkegad, Kharpunath, Simkot and northern Namkha rural municipality face more problems traveling outside the districts due to the cessation of flights.
Simkot, the district headquarters of Humla, is yet to be connected with the national road network. According to Simkot Airport, it sees disruption of flights since Sunday and as a result, aspiring passengers have been left stranded at the airport.
Those awaiting their flight for Simkot at Nepalgunj and Surkhet complained that the flight disruption had lengthened their stay and made the travel unnecessarily expensive. Now the services of private airlines companies have focused on tourist flights at Lukla, Pokhara and Jomsom.
The people of Humla complained that they are not the priority of airline service providers during the tourist season. “They do violate the rule for at least one flight for Humla in this season.”
The state-owned Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC) conducts only a limited number of flights for Nepalgunj-Humla and the people accuse of ‘influence of power’ in issuing air tickets.
As they said, NAC employees in Nepalgunj are accused of favoritism to their relatives and act upon the phone calls of people in power in the distribution of air tickets.
