The surreal quiet of the pristine glaciers, the towers of rock rising towards the sky. Then suddenly, an unexpected sound breaks the spell: a ladder falling from above, carried not by the hands of an exhausted Sherpa, but by a drone. I wonder how many lives this technology could have saved in the past decades. On theEverest, the highest and perhaps most lethal mountain on the planet, an epochal change is taking shape.
It is not a sudden storm or a new climbing route, but something more subtle and potentially more disruptive: the arrival of drones, flying machines capable of transporting in a few minutes what requires hours of mortal effort from humans.
Everest, the distance is getting shorter
Look at the numbers, and you'll immediately understand why this technology could change everything: on Everest Base Camp is located at about 5.364 meters above sea level, while Camp One is at 6.065 meters. The aerial distance? Just 2,9 kilometers. Yet, to travel it, a sherpa takes six to seven hours of arduous walking through hidden crevasses and unstable seracs. A drone? Six or seven minutes. The mathematics of survival couldn't be clearer.
And it's not just about time saved. It's about lives. Milan Pandey He sits at Base Camp, contemplating views that few have seen; but he arrived there without crampons or ice axes. He is a drone pilot, and his work is bringing the world ofMountain climbing a silent but profound revolution.
His goal is simple and noble: to help those Sherpas who have been blazing the trail for Western climbers for seventy years, often paying with their lives. Dozens of them have died doing so. Pandey, of Airlift Technology, a local drone mapping startup, believes that by combining its technological expertise with the mountain knowledge of the Sherpas, the roof of the world can become a less lethal place.
Drones on Everest: The Genesis of a Life-Saving Idea
Necessity is the mother of invention, they say. And what need is more pressing than survival? Mingma G Sherpa di Imagine Nepal, a company that has been guiding mountaineers for almost a decade, understood the importance of this type of assistance when it lost three friends and mountain guides in an avalanche in 2023. Their bodies were never recovered.
“They had to keep going up and down the mountain twenty times to first figure out the route and then come back for the equipment. I had heard that in China they use drones to help with this on another mountain, so I thought 'why not here?'”
tells with that disarming simplicity that only those who live with death on a daily basis can afford.
At the same time, Raj-BikramCEO Airlift Nepal, was mapping Everest in 3D with drones when the mayor of the Khumbu region asked him how much weight those devices could carry. A fortuitous idea, born from the intersection of pain and technology, tradition and innovation. In April 2024, with the help of two drones donated by China's DJI, Airlift has begun experimenting.
“At first, since it was also our first time at Everest Base Camp, we were not sure how the drone would perform at that altitude and temperature”
And it wasn’t an unfounded fear. The limited visibility and wind speed were among the main challenges. It took a month to learn the terrain. But it was worth it: Airlift Nepal’s first cleanup operation used a drone to bring about 500 kg of waste back from Camp One to Base Camp.
Man and machine, a necessary symbiosis
For the 2025 Everest climbing season, Pandey says Airlift will help the Sherpas carry gear first, and then pick up trash. It’s a partnership, not a replacement. The Sherpas point Pandey in the right direction, then he flies a small drone first to navigate the trail. Then the Sherpas do what they’ve always done: climb up to the dangerous seracs.
“Once they find out, ‘We need a ladder here,’ ‘We need a rope here,’ they send us the coordinates via walkie-talkie and then we fly the equipment there,” Pandey explains. Drones can also carry life-saving equipment like oxygen tanks and medicines.
There is still much to be done, of course. Each drone costs $70.000, and that’s just the beginning of the expenses. “Everything at Base Camp is expensive,” Bikram notes. “Because there’s no electricity, we need a lot of fuel to charge the batteries. The cost of actually getting to the camp, the labor cost, the accommodation, the food, there’s a lot.”
The roots of a tradition
Dawa Janzu Sherpa, 28, has been a “frontman” on Everest with the glacier doctors for eight years. The Sherpa team is led by an elder who has developed his experience in navigation and decides the route, but it is the frontman with his strength and youth who goes first on the glacier.
“There’s a lot of dry ice on Everest this year, which makes it very difficult to fix the trails, and there are a lot of ice towers in the middle,” he says. Drones are cutting the time and risk level in half, although he doesn’t do it for fun: it’s the sole support of his wife and two daughters.
“With the bad weather we’ve seen so far this year, we wouldn’t have fixed the trail in time if it weren’t for that help,” he adds. And maybe that’s the key: technology that doesn’t replace man, but helps him survive, to get home to his loved ones.
