Officials in Nepal say the wreckage of a missing passenger plane with 18 people on board has been located in the western district of Arghakhanchi.

The Nepal Airlines plane was flying from the resort city of Pokhara to Jumla when contact was lost shortly after take-off on Sunday.

An aviation official said the plane appeared to have crashed into a hill.

A helicopter had identified burning wreckage and search officials believed there were no survivors, he said.

"The search helicopter has reported that it has found the wreckage and has seen the tail portion of the plane burning," said Bimlesh Lal Karna, a rescue coordinator with the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal (CAAN).pw domain

"It has reported that there is no possibility of survivors."

Recovery teams would make their way to the site over land, because the helicopter could not touch down in the terrain, he said.

Fifteen passengers - reportedly including a child - and three crew members were on board the aircraft, which had started its journey in Kathmandu and stopped in Pokhara to refuel.

The passenger manifest states that one of the passengers was Danish.

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

In December the EU put all of Nepal's airlines on a blacklist and banned them from flying to the EU on safety grounds.

In Nepal, 13 private airlines fly to nearly 50 airports, many of them in difficult locations, surrounded by mountains, cloudy weather and with no road access.

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

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.