Helicopters revolutionise mountain rescue in Nepal

Sabin Basnyat made history this year when he piloted the highest ever helicopter rescue mission from Nepal's Mount Annapurna.

Sabin Basnyat made history this year when he piloted the highest ever helicopter rescue mission, airlifting three sick and exhausted Spanish climbers to safety from Nepal’s Mount Annapurna.

The dramatic and daring rescue, almost 7,000 metres up on one of the world’s tallest and most dangerous mountains, pushed the high-altitude helicopter flight to its limits - and probably saved the climbers’ lives.

It was possible thanks to a new service run jointly by local helicopter company Fishtail Air and Switzerland’s Air Zermatt, which has been rescuing climbers in the Alps for four decades.

“By the time we got to the Spanish climbers on Annapurna they were in really bad shape,” Basnyat told AFP. “There is no way they could have climbed down on their own.”

Home to Mount Everest, Nepal is a major draw for amateur adventure seekers and top mountaineers alike. But until recently it had no helicopters capable of being flown above 4,500 metres and mountaineers who got into trouble had to rely on teams of sherpas reaching them on foot.

Air Zermatt, pioneers of a high-altitude mountain rescue technique known as the “human sling” use Fishtail helicopters to mount rescue operations.

The technique involves a rescuer being harnessed to a cable and flown, dangling metres below the helicopter, to the scene of the accident. There, the victim can be picked up, harnessed to the cable and evacuated without the helicopter having to hover for too long at an altitude, where the thinness of the air makes flying difficult and dangerous.

“The demand for this kind of rescue will rise, I have no doubt,” Air Zermatt’s Gerold Biner told AFP by telephone from Switzerland.

Some mountaineers fear the helicopter service could lead to an influx of ill-prepared amateur climbers in the Himalayas.

Others have said it will kill the adventure of mountaineering, raising the prospect of unskilled climbers being airlifted to within a few hundred metres of peak summits.

But most in the mountaineering community have welcomed the new service.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 10^th, 2010.