World travelers who dreamed of seeing Everest: The family that died in a mountain helicopter crash
The bodies of a Mexican couple, their three children and their Nepali pilot have been recovered after their chopper went down at an altitude of 3,500 meters
A Mexican family of five died this Tuesday along with their Nepali pilot, Captain Chet Bahadur Gurung, after their helicopter crashed during a visit to Mount Everest. The bodies of Ismael Sifuentes and Luz González and their three twenty-something children, Abril, María José and Fernando, have been recovered near the town of Likhu, north of Kathmandu. The causes of the accident have not yet been determined, but the Nepalese police point to bad weather conditions. The family, who hailed from Nuevo León, had dreamed of seeing the highest peak in the world close up. The Mexican ambassador to India, Federico Salas, told EL PAÍS that they are already working with local authorities and surviving relatives to decide on the repatriation process.
Tuesday dawned sunny in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal and one of the main pilgrimage points for lovers of mountaineering. The Sifuentes González family was “excited” to be able to visit Everest, according to statements to local media by Captain Prakash Kumar Sedhain, a flight safety director at Manang Air, the company that organized the helicopter ride. The family had seen many videos of other tourists on YouTube doing the same thing, and wanted to experience it for themselves. “Unfortunately, it ended in disaster,” Sedhain acknowledged.
The Mexican family had first been to India, where they were scheduled to return on Wednesday. They crossed into Nepal on Sunday, and seeing Mount Everest was one of their main reasons for visiting the country. The helicopter ride to the 8,800-meter (29,031 ft) peak is a major tourist attraction, especially at this time of year, when monsoons make routes to the summit slippery and many roads are cut off by landslides. Thus, flights to the mountains become a popular option for the season.
Manang Air spokespeople said that the family managed to fulfill their dream, flying around the mountain for nearly an hour. The accident took place on the return flight. The helicopter made a short stop to refuel in Surke, a small mountain town that has a heliport at an altitude of about 2,200 meters and is attached to Lukla airport, from where many of the expeditions to the top of the Himalayas take off.
At around 10:05 a.m. local time, the helicopter with registration number 9N-AMV took off from Surke en route to Kathmandu. Just eight minutes later, according to Nepal’s civil aviation authority, the Lukla control tower lost communication with the aircraft. Alarms immediately went off. It took more than five hours to find the crashed helicopter. It was in the town of Likhupike, at about 3,500 meters above sea level, and it was “completely destroyed,” according to authorities in the district of Solukhumbu.
According to Manang Air’s preliminary investigations, “the helicopter initially hit the top of a tree and then hit the sloppy ridge with a huge impact between two passes in a dense forest,” Sedhain told The Kathmandu Post. The company’s flight safety director stressed that in the monsoon season it is very difficult to predict the weather because the clouds move very quickly.
The Prime Minister of Nepal, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, expressed his condolences on Twitter and announced a Cabinet meeting to create an inquiry committee to be headed by the Assistant Secretary for Tourism. This is the latest in a long series of accidents that have rocked Nepal in recent times. In January, 71 people were killed when a plane crashed near the resort city of Pokhara in the worst aviation accident in three decades.
With mass tourism to Everest and the proliferation of these short but risky flights, crashes are not unusual. Then there is a lack of maintenance of the runways and the poor training of some pilots. Manang Air said in a statement that Captain Chet Gurung, 55, had completed more than 7,000 flight hours since 2014, when he started working with the company.
Around 5:50 p.m. local time, the emergency services managed to recover the six bodies, which were transferred to Kathmandu University Hospital. The honorary consul of Mexico in Nepal and the Mexican ambassador in India, Federico Salas, have been in contact with the family.
The Sifuentes González family had shared many images of their world travels on their social networks, from Brazil to India. Ismael Sifuentes was a chemical engineer. His 27-year-old daughter Abril worked at the National Cancer Institute of Monterrey, and just a week ago had uploaded a photo at the Taj Mahal. The mother, Luz González, had also studied chemistry at the Autonomous University of Coahuila, where her family was from.
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