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plane crash at lukla, nepal 9-Oct-2008 At 9:18:57 PM JohnK

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First of all condolences to the families all those including of the 2 young Australians killed. Tragic and very sad to hear this.

I did this flight 2.5 years ago and have about 200 hours with a private pilot's license. When I did the flight I made sure I was seated right behind the pilot and co-pilot with whom I spent most of the 45 mins of the flight talking to - both had trained in OZ as part of their careers and were very keen to have a chat about flying, training, tecniques etc.

So my 2 cents worth - The flight is totally done in VMC conditions (i.e. visual flying without instruments - it's too dangerous there and the equipment does not exist) and without a GPS. When we began our approach one of the things I asked was "what is your going around point?" ie. when can you abort the landing? The response was a small river bed a few hundered meters before the runway threshold. It's very marginal. I can tell you my impressions were that the pilots are very professional, will do this flight several times per day when flying but it's also a very committing landing - very much like landing in a navy carrier.

My humble impressions were that once you committed to land there you have to land and going around is very difficult. So something like fast moving fog could easily have disrupted their view and have occured before they could go around again - so no other option but to try and land.

The video I have of the entire approach and landing is too big to load on FLICKR (bummer - as it shows that's it's like a jet landing on a navy carrier) but here is a link for a shot of the runway and area just before they usually turn on final. You can see - mountains everywhere!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnkazanas/130570734/in/set-72057594110240590/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnkazanas/130570715/in/set-72057594110240590/