Payload planner
Free calculator
What can actually lift your group?
A five-seat helicopter is a three-seat helicopter at Everest Base Camp, and a two-seat one higher up. Enter your party's real weights and see which aircraft can take them, before anybody quotes you.
Landing sites checked against
Largest party it plans
Default per passenger
What the check costs
Choose both ends of the flight and the people flying, and the planner will check every aircraft on the platform against them.
How this works
Why altitude decides who flies
Four things come out of a helicopter's lift before a passenger does, and at 5,500 m there is far less lift to start with.
Why can a five-seat helicopter only take two people to Everest Base Camp?
Air gets thinner with altitude, so a helicopter's rotor produces less lift. At Kala Patthar, above 18,000 ft, an AS350 is limited to a gross weight several hundred kilograms below its sea-level maximum — and the empty aircraft and its fuel come out of that first. What is left for passengers is usually two or three people, whatever the cabin seats.
Does the departure point matter, or only the landing site?
Whichever end is higher governs the answer. A flight down from Syangboche to Lukla is planned against Syangboche, because that is where the aircraft has to hover in the thinnest air.
Is fuel counted as payload?
No, and forgetting it is how a plan produces a number nobody can fly. This planner reserves the fuel needed to get back plus twenty minutes of reserve, and only what remains is available for passengers and bags.
Can I book from these numbers?
No. This is a planning estimate built from figures each operator has published, using a straight-line reading of a curved performance chart in standard conditions. The pilot's load sheet on the day, against the actual aircraft and the actual temperature, is the only calculation that dispatches a flight.
The other half of the plan is the leg itself — the flight-time calculator gives the distance between any two landing sites in Nepal, the time in the air, and whether the round trip is inside an aircraft’s published range. Once you know who can fly, the cost-per-person calculator works out whether seats or the whole aircraft is the cheaper way to buy it. The reason the aircraft can lift so little up there is the air itself — about half a sea-level breath at Everest Base Camp.