---
title: "Didier Delsalle's Everest helicopter record, in numbers"
description: "On 14 May 2005 an AS350 B3 settled on Everest's 8,848 m summit for 3 minutes 50 seconds. The FAI ratified a take-off record, not a landing one."
source: "https://gohelinepal.com/blogs/didier-delsalle-and-the-highest-helicopter-landing-ever-made"
markdown: "https://gohelinepal.com/md/blogs/didier-delsalle-and-the-highest-helicopter-landing-ever-made"
site: "Go Heli Nepal"
updated: "2026-09-14"
author: "Go Heli Nepal"
---

# Didier Delsalle's Everest helicopter record, in numbers

_Industry · 7 min read · published 2026-09-14_

On 14 May 2005 an AS350 B3 settled on Everest's 8,848 m summit for 3 minutes 50 seconds. The FAI ratified a take-off record, not a landing one.

Didier Delsalle landed a Eurocopter AS350 B3 on the 8,848 m summit of Mount Everest on 14 May 2005, and the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale ratified the flight. He stayed on the summit 3 minutes 50 seconds. He flew it again the next day. Nobody has repeated it since. The flight left from Lukla, in Nepal's Khumbu.

The record the FAI holds is not a landing record. It is a take-off record, and that turns out to be the most useful thing about it.

## What did the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale actually ratify?

A highest take-off, in subclass E-1, under record file number 11596.

The FAI's own account of the twentieth anniversary, published in May 2025, describes it in those words: the record gained was for highest take-off, from the peak of Everest at 8,848 m. Guinness World Records lists the same flight differently, as the highest helicopter landing, at 8,848 m, by Didier Delsalle flying a Eurocopter AS350 B3 on 14 May 2005.

Two registers, one flight, and a disagreement about which half of it was the record.

The take-off is the half that cannot be argued with. A helicopter can brush a surface and be lifted off it again by the air, and a skid touching snow proves very little. A helicopter that takes off from a summit must have been standing on it, and must then make enough power to leave.

That is why the rules put a clock on it. The FAI's account says the aircraft had to remain on the summit for two minutes before the flight would count. Delsalle stayed 3 minutes 50 seconds, and close to four minutes on the second attempt the following day. His own explanation for flying it twice, quoted since, was that he wanted to be sure it was repeatable.

**The numbers in the record, and where each of them comes from**

| Figure | Value | Where it comes from |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Date of the first landing | 14 May 2005 | FAI record file 11596 |
| Record category | Highest take-off, subclass E-1 | FAI |
| Summit height as recorded | 8,848 m | FAI and Guinness World Records |
| Time on the summit, day one | 3 min 50 s | Guinness World Records |
| Minimum stay for the record | 2 minutes | FAI |
| Aircraft | Eurocopter AS350 B3 | FAI and Airbus |
| Type's maximum flight altitude | 7,010 m | Airbus, for the H125 |

_8,848 m is the height that was in force for Mount Everest in 2005, and the record is written against it rather than against anything the aircraft measured._

## How far above the type's certified ceiling was the summit?

About 1,838 m above it.

Airbus gives the H125 — the current name for the AS350 B3 — a maximum flight altitude of 7,010 m on its technical information page for the type. The summit, as the record is written, is 8,848 m. The subtraction is the whole story of why one pilot has done this and no operator has.

Maximum flight altitude is a certified limit rather than a measured performance. It is the height the manufacturer will stand behind, and flying above it is a thing a test pilot does deliberately, with the manufacturer's engineers on the ground and an aircraft prepared for it.

The figure that governs a flight with people in it is lower again, and it is not a flight altitude at all. Airbus gives the same H125 a hover ceiling out of ground effect of 3,840 m at maximum take-off weight. That is 43 per cent of the summit height.

Delsalle's aircraft was nowhere near maximum take-off weight. It was a production airframe stripped for the attempt — no passengers, no cargo, the minimum fuel that would get it up and back — and flown solo. Every figure in the record belongs to an aircraft in that condition, and to no other.

## Why was getting to 9,000 m the easy part?

Because a month earlier the same aircraft type had already been higher than Everest, and it took under ten minutes.

On 14 April 2005, over Istres in France, Delsalle and the AS350 B3 set three FAI time-to-climb records while testing whether the Everest flight was practical at all: 3,000 m in 2 minutes 21 seconds, 6,000 m in 5 minutes 6 seconds, and 9,000 m in 9 minutes 26 seconds. This Day in Aviation and the FAI's record files both carry the three.

Nine thousand metres is 152 m above the summit of Everest.

So height was never the obstacle. Stopping at height was, and so was the air the summit makes for itself.

A climb is flown with airspeed, and airspeed hands the rotor air it does not have to generate. A hover generates all of its own. The two are different problems, and the altitude at which a helicopter can solve the second is always the smaller number.

The weather at the top is the third problem, and Delsalle's account of it is the part worth reading. He told Vertical Magazine of downdrafts strong enough that the aircraft showed 60 knots on the airspeed indicator while still moving backwards over the ground, at full power.

## Is the record still attached to the right height for Everest?

The record says 8,848 m, which was the accepted height of Mount Everest in May 2005.

It is no longer the accepted height. On 8 December 2020 the governments of Nepal and China announced a joint resurvey and a single agreed figure of 8,848.86 m. CNN and the Kathmandu Post both reported it as the first time the two had agreed on one number after more than a century of competing surveys.

Nothing was re-rated, and nothing needed to be. A record measures a flight, not a mountain, and the ground the skids touched is the same ground under either figure.

What it does mean is that the most-quoted number attached to this flight is a survey result rather than an aircraft reading. The altimeter that morning is not the record. The published height of the snow under the skids is, and that height has since been revised by 86 centimetres.

## What does the record mean for a helicopter flying out of Lukla, in Nepal's Khumbu?

Nepal's Everest helicopter flying works off Tenzing–Hillary Airport at Lukla, 2,845 m, which is where Delsalle's flight began and where the region's aircraft still refuel.

The airframe has barely changed in twenty years. The AS350 B3 is sold today as the H125, and it is the type most operators listed on Go Heli Nepal fly in the Khumbu.

What has changed is everything that is in it. A passenger landing in the Everest region tops out at about 5,500 m — Kala Patthar at 5,545 m, Everest Base Camp at 5,364 m — with people, bags and enough fuel to get home.

That is roughly 3,300 m below the summit, in the same aircraft, on the same mountain. The distance between a record and a Tuesday morning is three kilometres of altitude, and almost all of it is weight.

Which is the honest reading of 2005. The flight did not show that a helicopter can reach the summit of Everest with you aboard. It showed what has to come out of the aircraft before it can reach the summit at all, and that figure has not moved since.

Where the rest of that margin comes from — the ceilings, and the [highest helicopter altitude](https://gohelinepal.com/blogs/how-high-can-a-helicopter-fly-service-ceiling-explained) ever flown by any helicopter — is a separate subject with its own set of numbers.

## Questions

### What record did Didier Delsalle set on Mount Everest?

Didier Delsalle set the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale record for the highest take-off by a helicopter, from the 8,848 m summit of Mount Everest on 14 May 2005, flying a Eurocopter AS350 B3. The FAI lists it in subclass E-1 under record file number 11596. Guinness World Records lists the same flight as the highest helicopter landing. Both describe one flight and it has not been beaten.

### How long did Didier Delsalle stay on the summit of Everest?

Three minutes and fifty seconds on 14 May 2005, and close to four minutes when he flew the same aircraft back to the summit the following day. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale's account of the record says two minutes on the ground was the minimum for the flight to count, so both stays were roughly twice what the rules required.

### What helicopter did Didier Delsalle land on Everest?

A Eurocopter AS350 B3, the type Airbus now sells as the H125 and the aircraft that does most of the high-altitude flying in Nepal's Khumbu. It was a production machine stripped for the attempt, carrying no passengers, no cargo and the minimum fuel, flown by one pilot. Airbus gives the same type a maximum flight altitude of 7,010 m.

### How much higher than its certified ceiling did the AS350 B3 land?

About 1,838 m higher. Airbus publishes a maximum flight altitude of 7,010 m for the type on its technical information page, and the summit landing was made at the 8,848 m figure the record is written against. That gap is the whole reason the flight was made by a test pilot in a stripped airframe rather than by an operator.

### Is Didier Delsalle's Everest record still unbeaten?

Yes. The Fédération Aéronautique Internationale marked the twentieth anniversary of the flight in May 2025 with the record still standing, and no helicopter has landed on or taken off from the summit of Mount Everest since 15 May 2005. No commercial flight has ever been sold to the summit and none is planned.