Why do planes taking tourists to Nepal to visit Mount Everest keep on crashing?

Angie Gaunt woke up on a Friday last September to hear the radio announce an air crash in Kathmandu.

The report said that Britons were among those killed shortly after a Sita Air flight took off, en route to the Everest region.

Gaunt’s husband, Timothy Oakes, was in Nepal realizing his long-held dream of trekking to base camp.

‘I jumped out of bed screaming. Only a few hours earlier I’d read he was flying out to Lukla to start the trek,’ she says.

She called her friend Maggie Holding, whose husband Steve was travelling with Oakes. Days earlier, the four had enjoyed a meal before the men set off for Heathrow.

Calls to the Foreign Office confirmed that both men’s names were on the flight manifest. The FCO rang Holding to confirm Steve’s death as she watched footage of the burning wreckage on TV.

All of the 19 people on board, seven of whom were British, died. It was Nepal’s sixth fatal air crash – three of them Everest-bound – in two years, a period that claimed the lives of 95 people.

The lure of the Himalayas attracts more than 100,000 trekkers, including 40,000 Brits, each year to Nepal. Visitor numbers to Everest have doubled since the end of the civil war there in 2006.

Some 35,000 walk each year to Everest’s base camp, the vast majority starting from Lukla’s Tenzing-Hillary Airport.

Climbing the peak is also more popular than ever. Last spring was so busy there were queues on the upper slopes.

This spring is the 60th anniversary of the first ascent by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.

Trekkers and climbers are already flocking to Nepal to join in the celebrations. Thousands more will take Everest flights to view the peak from the air.

Now Angie Gaunt, Maggie Holding and other relatives of those killed in the Sita Air accident want to know what has been done to improve aviation safety.

Pilots and experts in Nepal fear more accidents will happen in a country where political failure and poor regulation are undermining its vital tourist industry.

Sixty years ago, when the British expedition left Kathmandu’s lush valley to climb Everest, they walked the whole way to base camp in around three weeks.

In 1953, with few cars and very few roads, there was no choice. The first planes only landed in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, in 1949. Now the city’s polluted streets are clogged with traffic.

A construction boom has gobbled up farmland to house a growing population swollen by those escaping poverty and the ten-year civil war that brought an end to the Nepalese monarchy.

Manju Pokhrel migrated to the city a decade ago, and built a shack on the banks of the polluted Manohara river, close to Kathmandu’s airport. She was one of the few up and about that September morning.

Flights into the Everest region start early to make the most of calm flying conditions. More than 60 flights a day land at Tenzing-Hillary Airport at the height of the season.