He survived, apparently, because he was thrown through the cockpit windshield onto the runway, while everyone else had to endure the airplane flipping and then falling back 50 meters down the hillside. The pilot of the ill-fated craft is quoted in Nepali papers as blaming Kathmandu-Lukla communications on the disaster, and Yeti Airlines officially claims that the airport was "suddenly" cloaked in fog, but the word at Lamidanda was simply that this guy, Surendra Kunwar, decided to play daredevil. If the gossip on the ground is to be believed, our pilot warned the tailing pilot not to attempt a landing. I guess that's the Nepali way of saying, "everyone else died". What about other people? The pilot survived. After awhile, word spread that an accident had occured. First, it was confirmed that visibility was poor in Lukla. In Nepal, information passes through several filters before it reaches a foreigner's ear. Shortly thereafter we found ourselves on the rarely-used landing strip at Lamidanda. I knew something was a tad haywire when, after 30 minutes or so, the plane began circling around some cloud-obscured location below. We took the third flight out of Kathmandu, bound to Lukla, on the morning of Oct 8.
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