[@Azaria Blue]

Oi, sorry my travels took me away longer than I had anticipated. I had a couple thoughts on this and had mentioned earlier in the thread. I was going to suggest a smaller, ferry flight plane that would be plausible for the destination and setting as well as our character count. Based on what I have read thus far, I was going to say a DC-3 would be a good choice. You can Google a seat map pretty easily.

I think I read somewhere that our originating flight took off from Beijing. In order to have a route that would take us to the location of our story I would suggest that flight to have been diverted to somewhere like Xigaze  or Nyingchi. Characters are then put on said smaller plane that crashes in route to Lhasa where the main hub of Tibetan travel takes place and where they would have boarded another jet had none of this ever happened. 

I'm posting this from my phone, but since we're off and running a little quicker than I thought we'd be I wanted to get these thoughts out there. What I thought would be an interesting twist to develop would be that the plane was brought down on purpose and we had a passenger that knew more than he/she was letting on and that the other characters had time to figure out over time. 

Still working on CS, should have him done by weekend. 

My .02