Why cant jump from mt everest?

Ive watch quite a few mountain climbing expediations where they spend a few days slowly making it to the top and in some cases some members return to a lower base camp if they are not up to it. Its my understanding that it is almost too high for a helecoptor to go up to those hights, but i had an idea.

Why cant folks jump and use a hang glider or parachute to come down from the top?

Just wondering.....

Not an expert but I would think the air is to thin to hand glide plus getting I hand glider up there might be tough. As for the parachute I don't think that it has a shear drop off to jump from.

Also, the unpredictable winds...unknown terrain at the landing area...etc...

JM-99

i think it was an expedition to Everest where someone brought a paid of skies though! His trip down was a lot faster and more fun

Thin air really isn't the problem-the glider would just pick up more speed until it was going fast enough to descend at it's normal rate. One problem I would think is the terrain. There just might not be a good glide path free of obstacles. Others I can think of are weather, visibility, and temperature. The slopes of mountains are frequently hit by heavy storms which can reduce visibility to zero and stir up fierce winds. You definitely don't want to be hang gliding under those conditions. Also, if it's already -50°F, the wind chill from gliding might well make it feel like -125°F. People and extreme cold don't mix very well.

On the bright side, if global warming keeps up the summit of Mount Everest will be much more friendly to climbers. In fact, it may well be the last piece of dry land left in a few hundred years.

Some time ago, there was a tv broadcast about a italian guy that flew over the Everest with a hang glider. He was pulled by a motorized ultralight-aircraft to nearly the height of Everest till the cable broke. He managed to fly over he Everest on its own. But he used a "real" hang glider, not these "parachutes".

A big problem is the weather ... Everest is often touched by jet streams with very high wind speeds. But the high altitude is the biggest problem, I think ... there is so little air/(pressure) at nearly 9000m, a hang-glider has problems to get sufficient buoyancy ... but a "base-jump" from Everest would bei definitly a cool thing to do

Btw ... a Eurocopter managed to land (30 secs touchdown) on Everest in May this year. The Nepalese denied it, because they hadn´t authorized it, but has obviously happened.

"Into Thin Air" by John Krakaur is an excellent book on Everest. People still die up there including this year. Anybody else have a good Everest book to recommend?

geepondy said:

"Into Thin Air" by John Krakaur is an excellent book on Everest. People still die up there including this year. Anybody else have a good Everest book to recommend?

Click to expand...

That is one of my favorite books. I got it from my dad and first read it in 6th grade.

As some people were saying earlier, the thin air would be a problem. If you took a person from sea level and put him on the top of everest, he would be dead in a couple minutes. Even the oxygen that they breath from tanks above 25,000 would not help you that much. When you are breathing oxygen from a tank at the top of everest, it is equivillent of breathing air at 26,000 feet. You would probably still die pretty quickly.

The reason that some people are able to climb to the top with out oxygen is because they get acclimatized to the thin air. This is(or was, have not checked in a while) pretty rare. Above 25,000 is known as the death zone I think, for a good reason. Usually when you climb everest you don't just start from the base camp and climb straight up to the top. You might climb half way to camp 1, and turn around to go back to base camp. You go a little farther each time, staying at different camps, while maybe climbing up to another camp, just to climb back down the next day or that same day, until the final push. It takes a few months to do al of this.

There are only a few weeks of the year that everest is not being blasted with 200 mile per hour winds of the jet stream.

Most of this info was from the book Into Thin Air I would recomend this book to any one.

I believe what Cobb is asking is why not use a parachute, hand glider etc, to get to the top of Mt Everest?

1) Lack of Challange. Although people suffer to the point of death while trying to go up the mount, the feeling of accomplishment superseeds everything.

2) Weather. At and close to the top, there are some terrible blizards up there. One would have to time the weather perfectly to attempt anything. The winds could easily destroy a parachute and hand glider.

3) Maybe the thinness (density) of the air really does play a role.

i)On a show some years ago, a man jumped from a plane which was as high as can be (somewhere close to the edge of our atmosphere). He couldn't open his parchute early because the speed he was going at would rip it apart. He initially fell at more than 700 mph actually breaking the sound barrier. [url="http://www.balloonlife.com/publications/balloon_life/9510/balloonm.htm]I believe this is the guy.[/url] Normally when a person jumps from a plane, they reach somewhere from 60-130mph. This is at about 10000 ft. To jump from a plane to reach the top of Mt Everest, the plane would have to be at least 50000 ft high(9.47 miles).

ii) The second thing I believe is the ability of the human body to adapt. It will take what, 4hrs (guestimate) to reach the jump point. That is not nearly enough time for a human to adapt to the pressure and oxygen differences from sea level and just above. The individual will still have to take the x days to climb down the mountain with whatever they could carry on the jump and may not survive.