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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

If nothing else, I'd imagine it's nicer for everyone else not to have to step over a pile of dead bodies to get up the mountain.

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There's already more than a few bodies up there now. Some are a little famous, like the green boots guy. The bodies can't be removed.

It's such an extreme environment. You can't really rescue people who are in trouble. At best, with multiple climbers, you can have someone else tell you that you shouldn't proceed, which might save your life.

But if someone is already in trouble, you can't really help out, or you will die too. Sure, if you have an extra energy bar, you can give that to your buddy, but that's about it.

> There's already more than a few bodies up there now. Some are a little famous, like the green boots guy. The bodies can't be removed.

The Times just had an interesting feature on Everest body recovery: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/18/sports/everes...

This. The linked article's title is "Deliverance From 27,000 Feet". It's been posted on HN four times (see https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F... ), but I believe first post is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15951204

Although the main theme of the article is about the recovery of a body from near the summit, it has background information on when climbs can take place, and how the route to the summit is established every year.

IMO, it's a worthwhile read!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didier_Delsalle I bet you could design helicopter that would be able to repeat this with much less effort

That chopper was stripped to the bone so that one dude could fly in it, with a fuel time of 1 hour. It also landed on the summit which is more flat. Don't think it would be easily and safely able to carry an addition (dead) body that's probably perched on an incline, let alone carry rescuers. It takes upwards of 6 hours to chip the dead body off the ice (if it's been frozen there for a while)

According to Wikipedia, he didn't remove that much:

> Delsalle used a virtually standard version of the Eurocopter AS350 Squirrel B3, only removing unnecessary elements, such as passenger seats, to reduce the standard weight by 120 kg (265 lb) and thus extend the 1-hour fuel range.

And in any case, I believe the user you responded to was talking about rescues, not removing corpses.

I am not advocating building one or using it to remove bodies I am just speculating that it's possible to design and build a model that could accomplish the fit much easier and that theoretically could be used for rescue. It's obviously would require too much $ to be practical.

You don't need to use a manned one at all . You could design unmanned drone which can carry the weight of the (dead)person. Losses while perhaps costly will improve the design and more acceptable than risking human lives.

The rotor would have to be enormous and fast, and the helicopter incredibly light with very little payload. One or both of those constraints are probably beyond our materials knowledge, particularly a controllable rotor that would work.

Passenger jets are fine up there because they haul ass, often north of Mach 0.7-0.8, and push as much of the thin air as possible over the wing. (One of the cool things about commercial air travel is that most people don’t realize they’re flying at transonic speeds, but you’ll occasionally see evidence of it in flight.) It doesn’t take much slowing down for a passenger jet to start descending, and ultimately stall, at cruising altitude. The flight envelope at Everest altitude is much smaller than you’d expect.

For a helicopter, you’d need to replicate that set of circumstances, but with wings rotating above you instead. One has to worry about other conditions, too: in the '70s, when Boulet set the helicopter altitude record above 40,000, the engine flamed out on account of how cold it was and wouldn’t restart. High altitude helicopters are a very difficult design problem, and there isn’t much economic demand to solve it.

The above link the dude did it 2 days in a row on a stock stripped down helicopter. If you had tolerance for higher cost you can make a much lighter version replacing parts with composites, titanium etc. and modding the engine to work better at high altitude.

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