“I can’t tell you how many missions I’ve flown per day. It’s not the numbers that are important to me, but the quality of the missions.” This statement says a lot about Maurizio Folini‘s character.
The 59-year-old Italian is not only a helicopter pilot with heart and soul, but also a passionate mountain rescuer. Folini has been flying regular missions on the world’s highest mountains since 2011. In 2013, he achieved the highest helicopter rescue of all time on Mount Everest when he transported a Nepalese mountaineer down from 7,800 meters on a longline.
This Everest spring season, he has once again used his aircraft from the Nepalese company Kailash Helicopter Services to rescue many climbers suffering from high altitude sick from the mountain. “I flew a lot of missions in total. There were days when I landed six to eight times at Camp 2 (at 6,400 meters). On other days, I flew less,” says Maurizio.
120 helicopter flights above the base camp
Lakpa Sherpa, who has been working on the highest mountain on earth for over 20 years, has an overview of the air traffic on the south side of Everest – also as an experienced mountain rescuer: Lakpa has completed courses in Italy, Austria and Switzerland. He describes himself as the “official mayor of Everest Base Camp”. He also coordinates the helicopter rescue flights up the mountain for the local infirmary, the Everest ER. “There have been more than 50 rescue flights this season,” Lakpa writes to me. “All in all, there were around 120 flights above the base camp.”
Officially, helicopter use is only permitted for rescue purposes – and for some years now, by government decree, also for transporting materials up to Camp 2 at 6,400 meters. In recent years, however, there have also been isolated reports of climbers being flown out of Camp 2 by helicopter under the pretext of a medical emergency. In the spring season of 2023, the Hungarian mountaineer Szilard Suhajda – who later died while attempting to climb Everest without bottled oxygen and without a Sherpa companion – reported that individual climbers had also been flown from base camp to Camp 2 by helicopter that year – for 4,000 dollars.
Helicopter and pilot at the limit
Helicopter flights at such high altitudes are extremely demanding for people and equipment. The “thin” air, or rather the drop in air pressure with altitude, ensures that the oxygen partial pressure also drops. This is the pressure at which oxygen is forced into the lungs.
The low oxygen partial pressure can not only lead to life-threatening forms of high altitude sickness, but also to dizziness, difficulty concentrating and slower reactions. A helicopter pilot on Everest cannot afford any of this, as his aircraft is also at its limit in the thin air.
The performance of the engines drops, as does the overall lift of the helicopter. This is why as much weight as possible is avoided. “We always fly with very little kerosene so that the helicopter is light, so fuel management is difficult,” Maurizio explains to me. From an altitude of around 4,000 meters, he uses supplemental oxygen, “either via a nasal cannula or a proper breathing mask,” says Folini. Another risk factor on Everest that is difficult to calculate is the weather, which can change within minutes.
“Fortunately, relatively few fatalities”
“The 2025 season was characterized by rather bad weather,” the Italian helicopter pilot sums up. “The conditions on the mountain were good, but the many bad weather conditions took their toll on mountaineers, mountain rescuers and helicopter pilots. Fortunately, there were relatively few fatalities compared to previous years.”
Five people lost their lives this Everest season, three of them on the mountain. The fact that there have not been more is also due to the selfless efforts of the rescue teams on the mountain, in the air and at base camp: the Climbing Sherpas, who sometimes carry their sick clients down, the helicopter pilots who fly the patients to base camp and doctors like Ashish Lohani, who look after the sick in the Everest ER.
“The collaboration works very well,” says Maurizio. “I have coordinated many rescues with Dr. Ashish. Even a resuscitation of a patient that I brought down from an altitude of 7,200 meters with the longline. A few minutes later, the patient was in the hands of Dr. Ashish. After an hour in the Everest ER medical tent, he was flown by helicopter to Lukla and then to the CIWEC hospital in Kathmandu.”
Ashish Lohani counted around 800 treatments in the Everest ER this spring, as he told me. Most of the cases were high altitude coughs or respiratory infections.
Poorly prepared or not suited to the altitude
When Maurizio Folini makes his way from base camp up to Western Cwm, the “Valley of Silence”, in his helicopter, the illnesses are usually far more dangerous. “There was slightly less frostbite and snow blindness than in other years,” says the pilot. Almost all of the patients he flew suffered from high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), says Maurizio: “Probably also because many people are not properly prepared or their bodies are not suited to the extreme altitude. The use of rather a lot of bottled oxygen (five bottles per client) makes everything seem easier. But then the body can react differently than expected.”
With HAPE, water collects in the mountaineer’s lungs. The disease can be fatal, and the sick person must be brought to lower altitudes as quickly as possible. This can be done in a few minutes by helicopter. But each of these rescues is a risk for the pilot due to the dangerous conditions on the mountain. Especially above Camp 2, where the helicopter can no longer land and from where the sick or injured have to be flown down to the valley with a long rescue line.
Only around a dozen pilots are on duty above Everest Base Camp, reports Maurizio, who also trains local pilots and ground staff for the tricky rescue missions at high altitudes outside of the climbing season in Nepal. “But only two people do longline rescues above Camp 2,” says Folini: himself and the Nepalese pilot Bibek Khadka, who flies for the helicopter company Altitude Air. They are also among the “silent heroes” on Mount Everest that hardly anyone talks about. Yet they put themselves in danger for other people – which is anything but a matter of course.
