"If God made the Earth, then he kept heaven for Nepal. See? That's the heaven there," says Priya Adhikari as she flies her chopper to the top of the world.

Key points: Priya Adhikari is Nepal's lone female rescue helicopter pilot

Priya Adhikari is Nepal's lone female rescue helicopter pilot She has flown to 6,200 metres above sea level to rescue a climber

She has flown to 6,200 metres above sea level to rescue a climber At least 11 people died during the Everest climbing season this year

From her helicopter cockpit, Ms Adhikari is pointing towards a cluster of jagged peaks including Mount Everest.

"Do you go mountain climbing?" asks one of her passengers.

"I don't climb, I land," she laughs.

Nepal's only female helicopter rescue pilot says she has seen enough death and destruction on the mountains to rid her of any desire to climb them.

Besides, she has enough hurdles in her day job.

"I face one every day, I face hundreds of thousands of them," she says, when asked if being a woman throws up any professional challenges.

"The first thing is the trust from the passengers. Whenever they see me, some of them are like, 'oh … female pilot'," she trails off, imitating her more sceptical clients.

When she first started flying to remote outposts in the Himalayas, men asked her whether she was safe staying in a guesthouse alone, or how she expected to bunk down in a tent full of male Sherpas if the weather turned bad.

Flying is a male-dominated profession, and Nepal is a conservative country where women are expected to stay at home, or work in a narrow range of occupations.

Ms Adhikari says some passengers are sceptical when a female pilot arrives. ( ABC News: Siobhan Heanue )

Ms Adhikari started off in one of them, working as an airline cabin attendant before a joyride in a helicopter set her on a different path.

"The moment I was inside and the helicopter took off I was like, 'hell yeah! Can I be a pilot?'" she says.

It was quite a pivot from her previous life, in which she had also been a contestant in the Miss Nepal beauty pageant.

Adhikari gives up oxygen supply to save climber in peril

At any moment, Ms Adhikari could be re-routed from tourist flights or medicine resupply runs deep in the Himalayas to rescue an injured trekker — or to remove the frozen body of a dead climber.

Bodies are often discovered on the mountains years after people go missing.

The view of the Himalayas from Ms Adhikari's cockpit. ( ABC News: Siobhan Heanue )

She says she recently retrieved the body of a Sherpa who died in 2006.

Ms Adhikari brought the body of Australian climber Maria Strydom down to Kathmandu after her death on Mount Everest in 2016.

Recently, she rescued a 16-year-old Australian girl who was suffering from acute mountain sickness in the Khumbu region.

The teenager could barely breathe when she was loaded into the helicopter at more than 4,000 metres above sea level.

Ms Adhikari gave up her own pilot's supply of oxygen so her patient could live.

"I was like, 'hey, you're just 16, you don't know life and you are here struggling to survive'. That was so emotional for me," she recalls.

Ms Adhikari has flown to heights of 6,200 metres above sea level. ( ABC News: Siobhan Heanue )

Flying in a single-pilot, single-engine Squirrel, Ms Adhikari hooks herself up to a cylinder of oxygen to stave off hypoxia — deprivation of oxygen to the tissues — as she cruises through the snowy peaks of the Himalayas.

She recently set a personal record for her highest rescue.

She landed at a climber's camp at 6,200 metres on Mount Kanchenjunga, the world's third-highest mountain.

A boss in the skies and a dutiful daughter at home

At home, Ms Adhikari wakes up at 5:00am to prepare the day's meals for her father.

Like any good Nepalese girl, she acquits these household duties out of love and obligation to her parents.

But by 6:00am, she is out the door and on the way to the airport.

There, she assertively runs her entirely male staff through the day's missions, discussing weather conditions and running through weight and balance calculations.

Ms Adhikari looks after the chopper herself when she is at remote locations. ( ABC News: Siobhan Heanue )

In remote outposts, she will do all the work herself, refuelling her helicopter by lifting and pouring jerrycans, and climbing on top of her aircraft to manually check the rotors.

Sometimes she will dump passengers' luggage if she is required to fly a little higher in weather that is a little warmer.

"Whenever people ask 'is your job a girl thing?', I say 'no, actually, it's a man thing'. The work I do is really hard," she says.

Nepal's helicopter rescue industry was recently tarnished by revelations of scamming and corruption in the sector.

The so called "fake-rescue" scandal revealed that some trekking companies, hospitals and aviation companies were involved in an insurance racket.

They would persuade tourists to call for rescues when they did not need them, so they could benefit from insurance kickbacks.

Ms Adhikari is not afraid to criticise examples of lax safety standards that have brought Nepalese aviation under scrutiny.

In fact, she bore the brunt of it earlier this year when a runaway aircraft slammed into her stationary helicopter at a mountain airport.

The incident made world headlines, with dramatic footage showing a plane skidding off the short airstrip at Lukla airport and crashing into two parked choppers.

Ms Adhikari was sitting in the cockpit drinking a coffee when she felt the collision.

Three people were killed in the crash, but she managed to escape unscathed.

She was frustrated to see the same airline flying at the same airport the next day, without any pause for investigation.

Ms Adhikari managed to escape the fatal crash unscathed. ( Supplied: Twitter/ Devraj Lama )

But Nepal is still a place where some of the world's greatest feats in aviation take place.

The world's highest recorded helicopter rescue was at 7,010 metres in Nepal, and aviators who fly at such high altitudes are considered to be highly specialised operators.

Earlier this year, a pilot was paid by the wife of a lost climber to conduct a rescue at between 7,500 and 7,700 metres, after the man's insurance company refused to send a helicopter.

The flight was well above the manufacturer-recommended safe altitude and contravened local aviation laws, but the climber was rescued.

The top of the world is now overcrowded

People come to the Himalayas to push their limits, and that can have a knock-on effect among the high-altitude workers that keep the industry going.

The climbing sector is unregulated.

This image of climbers waiting near the summit of Everest went viral in May 2019. ( Supplied: Nirmal Purja )

That means inexperienced climbers are increasingly using inexperienced or incompetent guides as people seek to cash in on the popularity of big-peak mountaineering.

At least 11 people died on Everest this year alone, with some blaming the death toll on overcrowding on the route to the summit.

Ms Adhikari says she will sometimes take a calculated risk when she knows a life depends on her turning up, but often the mountains win.

"It's really hard to make a judgement when you know someone is really dying up there and the weather is challenging," she says.

Sometimes she cannot get to them.

"You know that someone is actually hoping the helicopter will come and take them and when you're not able to make it, that's a bad feeling," she says.

During a brief stop to refuel within view of Mount Everest, Ms Adhikari walks from her helicopter clutching an air sickness bag.

Surely not, I think.

She beckons me over.

"A guy in a village gave me a gift," she says.

Gently opening the sick bag, she pulls out a piece of yartsa, or 'caterpillar fungus', a Himalayan delicacy that sells overseas for more than $150,000 per kilogram.

It was a precious gift with a special message.

"He said, 'this is for you, always fly safe'."