May 14, 2005
French pilot Didier Delsalle (born in 1957) became the first and to date only person to land a helicopter on top of Mount Everest. With an elevation of 29,030 feet (8,848 meters), Mount Everest — located at the border between Nepal and Tibet in the Himalayas — is Earth’s highest mountain above sea level.
Delsalle was a test pilot for Eurocopter (now known as Airbus Helicopters), the largest supplier of helicopters. The helicopter that he used for his unprecedented flight to the summit of Mount Everest was a Eurocopter AS350 B3 Écureuil. (The accompanying 2012 photo features this type of Eurocopter flying in the skies above Switzerland’s Canton of Valais.)
Delsalle’s pioneering flight on that early May morning had more than its fair share of potential hazards. He later described the key challenges that were very much a part of this high-altitude flight. “When you reach the summit you reach the updraft point, and of course the updraft winds have enough force to throw you away as soon as you put the collective down,” Delsalle recalled in a 2017 interview with Vertical magazine. “I had to stick my skids on the summit and push into the mountain to stay on the summit. Another big problem there is that you have no visual of the summit, and you have no specific cues, because you are on the highest point. You are in free air in fact, and you have to try to find where is the summit exactly.”
In a December 2005 interview with National Geographic, Delsalle elaborated more on what was going through his mind as he prepared to land his aircraft onto Mount Everest. “During the approach, I was so focused I had tunnel vision,” he noted. “But I arrived very gently and asked the mountain to accept me. It was like making a new friend.”
This landing was recorded by quite a few cameras and other equipment to help confirm that a new record had indeed been established and could be certified as such by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale. After briefly remaining atop Mount Everest, Delsalle lifted off that peak and flew back to Tenzing-Hillary Airport in the Nepalese town of Lukla. The following day, he again piloted his helicopter to the summit of Mount Everest. “I did it twice to make sure it’s repeatable,” Delsalle explained in his interview with National Geographic. “To qualify as a landing, you have to touch down for at least two minutes. The first day, I landed for three minutes and 50 seconds. On the second day I was there for four minutes.”
Photo Credit: Hansueli Krapf (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Simisa) — licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
For more information on Didier Delsalle’s record-setting helicopter flight to the top of Mount Everest, please check out https://verticalmag.com/features/landing-everest-didier-delsalle-recalls-record-flight/
A video of this flight is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXNXSvnCtKA
Additional information on Delsalle is available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Delsalle
Transportation History 