One day in May, Sergio Gor, President Trump’s special envoy for South Asia, appeared at the base camp of Mount Everest. Dressed in a black jacket emblazoned with “Trump Force One,” Gor sang the praises of the drone displayed next to him.
The U.S. is pushing an American drone to challenge China in a new race to support mountaineers, setting up an unusual superpower contest in one of the most remote areas of the world.
“The finest technology in the world—American,” said Gor, of an industrial drone made by Freefly Systems, a Woodinville, Wash.-based designer and manufacturer of heavy-lift drones.
The U.S. is lobbying for Freefly to enter the new business of using drones to deliver supplies to climbers and carry away the trash they leave behind, a task on which China’s SZ DJI Technology has a head start.
The contest has geopolitical undertones. Mount Everest straddles the border between Nepal and China. Beijing’s investment and involvement in Nepal have grown significantly in recent years. Meanwhile, the U.S. has designated DJI as a Chinese military company.
Since 2024, Nepali drone company Airlift Technology has been working with DJI to test and deploy its heavy-lift drones to deliver supplies from base camp, situated at around 17,500 feet, to the next camp, at 19,900 feet, and collect trash left by climbers, helping to relieve the dangerous burden usually borne by Sherpa expedition porters.
After earlier testing a model that can carry a roughly 65-pound payload at sea level, Airlift deployed the DJI FlyCart 100 drone at Everest for this spring’s climbing season. That drone can carry more than 200 pounds at sea level and about 100 pounds on the mountain, according to company specifications. Flying at higher altitudes reduces the payload the drones can carry.
The Chinese drone maker said this year it delivered thousands of pounds of supplies and hauled away more than 6,000 pounds of refuse generated by climbers. That includes used oxygen cylinders, discarded climbing gear and human excrement. The drones make a grueling job a little bit easier by delivering a hot breakfast in minutes to Sherpa climbers who set out in the middle of the night with just headlamps to guide them.
This year a DJI survey drone also mapped the Khumbu Icefall, a deadly stretch of the ascent marked by towering shards of ice and yawning crevasses, to help veteran Sherpa climbers, known as “icefall doctors,” plan safer routes.
Washington has over the years flagged risks that Beijing could access data collected by DJI drones around the world and potentially manipulate or interfere with the aircraft. In December, the Federal Communications Commission banned the use of new foreign-made drones in the U.S.—a move aimed largely at Chinese firms.
“It’s unfortunate for our innovation-driven industry that country of origin often overshadows the technological breakthroughs solving real-world problems,” said a DJI spokesperson Friday in response to a query about the U.S.-China rivalry at Everest.
The company has previously said U.S. suspicions about its drones are unfounded and are a form of protectionism.
The U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, where Gor is based, declined to comment.
In the run-up to Gor’s visit to Everest, Airlift—the Nepali company that operates DJI drones there—was set to help Freefly carry out a flight up the mountain, said Airlift co-founder Milan Pandey.
The American Embassy in Nepal said at the time that U.S. commercial drone technology “will enable deliveries on Mount Everest in a few minutes, in contrast to multiple-day treks.”
However, the night before Gor’s scheduled arrival at base camp, Nepal’s Home Affairs Ministry told local authorities in the Everest region that it wouldn’t grant permission for the flight of the American drone, according to an April 30 letter seen by The Wall Street Journal.
The ministry said it needed to “consult with other stakeholder agencies regarding security sensitivities.”
Asked to comment, Freefly described its device as “the world’s toughest drone” but didn’t address specific questions about its potential use on Everest.
In the same April letter, the ministry pulled the permit for the DJI drone that it had granted in March, the start of the spring climbing season. The fallout from that decision illustrated the importance the drones have already assumed for climbers.
In the spring, the icefall doctors had finally managed to open the Khumbu Icefall section, after a massive overhanging glacial chunk, called a serac, blocked the path for much of the early climbing season.
With only a month of the season remaining, and a record 495 climbers from dozens of countries itching to get started, anxious expedition operators surrounded the government’s field office at the base camp, asking it to resume drone supply flights to the higher camp to make up for lost time.
“We will uproot your tent!” some of them said, according to Khim Lal Gautam, a Nepal government officer in charge of monitoring mountaineering activities at the base camp.
Five days later, the Home Ministry gave the go-ahead for the DJI drone to again operate on Everest for three months, while reiterating rules that require drones to maintain a minimum distance from the country’s international borders, in this case with China. It also said that the drone shouldn’t capture imagery outside its permitted area of operation.
Binoj Basnyat, a retired Nepali army major general and an independent strategic analyst based in Kathmandu, said the initial decision to restrict both the U.S. and Chinese drones “could be interpreted as an effort to maintain strategic neutrality,” while the reinstatement of the DJI drone showed “the tension between strategic neutrality and practical necessity.”
The U.S. government’s push for a foothold for American drone technology on Everest recalls the history of geopolitical jostling in the Himalayan region during the Cold War.
In the 1960s, Nepal’s mountainous region of Mustang, west of Everest, was the base for CIA-backed Tibetan rebels fighting against China for the independence of the Tibetan region. The U.S. remains one of the most prominent backers of the cultural and political rights of Tibetans, tens of thousands of whom are in exile in India and Nepal.
Farther west, on the Nanda Devi mountain in the Indian Himalayas, the U.S. and India collaborated in 1965 to install a nuclear-powered monitoring station to spy on Chinese nuclear tests and missile firings, an effort that failed after a heavy blizzard forced the climbers to abandon their equipment.
Airlift’s Pandey, 32, said he believes that Chinese and U.S. drones need not be rivals on Everest—but could complement each other.
His team tested the Freefly drone after it arrived in Nepal and found it could lift 33 pounds at sea level. Based on their data from operating drones on Everest, its payload would likely drop to about a third of that on the mountain, just a fraction of the Chinese drone’s capability.
The U.S. drone may have an edge on speed on the mountain, given it’s far lighter than the Chinese machine.
“A big drone takes time to set up, take off, and reach up there,” said Pandey. “But Freefly is smaller…it is instant and goes straight there.”That could make the American drone more useful for rapid emergency response and dropping light payloads.“If a Sherpa worker or a climber falls into a crevasse in the icefall, Freefly could launch instantly and drop a harness, rope or medical kit directly into the crevasse within two or three minutes,” said Pandey, expressing disappointment at not being able to test the U.S. drone on Everest.
Write to Krishna Pokharel at krishna.pokharel@wsj.com
