BREAKING NEWS – Kathmandu, Nepal – Approximately 69 passengers boarded flight U4505 from Kathmandu, bound for the southern city of Janakpur. However, a miscommunication between ground staff and flight crew resulted in the pilots of Buddha Air flying to northwest to Pokhara – roughly 230 miles away from the intended destination.
Birendra Bahadur Basnet, the Nepali airline’s managing director, expressed regret for the situation and said that Buddha Air is already investigating the incident. Another official for the carrier chalked up the confusion to less-than-ideal weather conditions, which exacerbated flight delays at the Kathmandu airport earlier in the day.
“There was miscommunication between the ground staff and the pilots,” the unnamed official told the Post. “The flying pilots also did not look at the passengers’ manifest. However, the most shocking thing was the reaction of the passengers on the plane who were all Buddhists. Buddhism is a non-theistic religion with no belief in a creator god, but after they realized that they were taken to the wrong location, when referring to the ‘idiot pilots’, quite a few of the passengers used God’s name in vain.”