Nobody had ever climbed mountains that high. There were no truly competent people around at that time, at least not competent in high altitude mountaineering.

Except the Sherpa's.

I doubt at that era Sherpas had experience climbing with oxygen either.

Do you have a source for this? I have read quite a bit about climbing in the Himalayas and I have never heard of Sherpas climbing at high altitude in the 1920s.

I'm not sure about other mountains, but the Sherpas were against climbing Mount Everest because they considered it sacrilegious.

Everest would have been covered in tibetan Buddhist prayer flags if that were the case.

The day napoleon was defeated, europe was filled with generals who knew it better and would have won. We know much more in hindsight - and every game is easier with perfect information.

We have send people to space in space-suits, which when under pressure would extend there arms and were no longer able to fold them back in. We know better now, but back then we didn't know. So the art to prepare for such "adventures" is very different to what we imagine. No endless information gathering, instead you select a person that can improvise on the spot with the spotty information you have. You give them tools to improvise: Knifes to cut the spacesuit open, duct-tape and rubber-tourniquets to keep the helmet pressurized. Not great, not terrible. Oh, and in hindsight, do the first spacewalk unmanned?

> Oh, and in hindsight, do the first spacewalk unmanned?

That is one of the incomprehensible things for me about the early pioneers of parachute technology. Why did people throw themselves off from the Eifel tower when they could have tested and perfected the jump with a sack of potatoes or sand?

> Why did people throw themselves off from the Eifel tower

Tangential, but I think there was just one incident, and the guy was considered a crackpot even when he was alive. They thought he was going to throw a dummy off, but against all advice he insisted on doing it himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt

> which when under pressure would extend there arms and were no longer able to fold them back in. We know better now, but back then we didn't know.

Huh. Did we really do this without testing it in a vacuum chamber on the ground first?

Yeah. The claim doesn’t ring true for NASA in those days.

> One really wonders about the competence of the committee which was selecting climbers for the fatal attempt.

That's not really what happened. There wasn't some committee deciding that Mallory and Irvine should go up that day - it was the result of health, weather, conditions, injuries, and politics inside the group. They were months of travel away from anything resembling a committee!

This is a pretty gross generalization, and not one that I recall Wade Davis (the best boo I have read so far on Mallory) adopts; He does go into the fiddly nature of the O2 tanks a lot - The oxygen apparatus was new to everyone back then, and Irvine was there because he was the most proficient in it's use.

competence ... committee

one wonders ...