Phaplu Airstrip
Project details
Phaplu already had a short, neglected airstrip when Sir Edmund Hillary visited the village in 1974. At a lunch with Ang Kazi Lama, head of the wealthiest Sherpa family in Phaplu, Sir Ed was asked to lengthen it, and the family offered land nearby for a hospital too. He agreed to both. Through 1974 and 1975, Sir Ed had the strip lengthened, while his brother Rex Hillary and mountaineer Murray Jones led the team building the new hospital going up beside it, so planes could fly in the materials for the build.
The work was still underway when tragedy struck. On 31 March 1975, Sir Ed's wife Louise and 16-year-old daughter Belinda were killed when their light aircraft crashed on takeoff from Kathmandu, on a flight bound for Phaplu so Louise could see the hospital's progress. Sir Ed was waiting on the airstrip when a helicopter brought the news instead. He and Rex kept building through the rest of that year, and the hospital was finished by the end of 1975.
Phaplu sits in the Solu valley, well south of the high Khumbu villages where Sir Edmund Hillary had spent the previous decade building schools, Khunde Hospital and the Lukla airstrip. In 1974 he turned his attention to Solu. Phaplu already had an airstrip, but it was short and neglected. Sir Ed was invited to a lavish lunch at the home of Ang Kazi Lama, head of the wealthiest Sherpa family in the village. Lengthening the airstrip was part of the request, but the more important ask was a petition to build a hospital on land the family would donate. Sir Ed looked around from the lunch, south at the high school he had just built at Salleri, west at the airstrip he would improve, east at a hospital site among the pines, and accepted.
Fundraising and planning ran through 1974, backed by a $175,000 grant from the New Zealand government and $40,000 raised from the New Zealand public. Sir Ed decided the whole family would live in Kathmandu and Phaplu for 1975 while the hospital went up. His brother Rex Hillary led the building team, with mountaineer Murray Jones, and sirdar Mingma Tsering was already levelling the hospital site and had the airstrip's lengthening under way early in the project. Sir Ed flew back and forth between Phaplu and Kathmandu as the work progressed, the extended strip letting materials, and his own expedition parties, fly straight in by plane.
On 31 March 1975, Sir Ed's wife Louise and their 16-year-old daughter Belinda were due to fly in from Kathmandu so Louise could see the hospital's progress. Sir Ed waited at the airstrip as the arrival time came and went. What reached Phaplu instead was a helicopter, carrying journalist Liz Hawley with the news that the plane had crashed on takeoff at Kathmandu. The pilot had taxied out without the routine check that removes a locking rod from the aileron before flight. Without it, the plane could not be steered into a turn, and it went down in a paddy field and burst into flame. Louise and Belinda were both killed.
Sir Ed later wrote to friends, "I knew it was all my fault, Louise had hated flying in small planes, but I had ignored her fears." He fell into four years of depression, and people who had known him for years said he was never quite the same person again afterwards. But the building did not stop. Five days after the crash, he wrote, "On Monday we go back into Phaplu for a while to start work going again on the hospital. Whatever else happens I feel the task must be finished." Rex Hillary's team completed the hospital's stone buildings by the end of 1975, and Phaplu Hospital opened the following year with its first resident doctors.