17 Years After Her Husband’s Crash in Nepal, a Pilot Met the Same Fate

When her husband, a pilot for a small Nepali airline, died in a 2006 plane crash, Anju Khatiwada made a vow: She would continue his dream.

In the face of family opposition, she gave up her nursing career and pursued years of pilot training in the United States, raising her daughter with the help of her parents. Upon her return to Nepal, she took up flying for the same company, Yeti Airlines, in 2010, rising to the rank of captain after racking up thousands of hours in the air.

On Sunday, she met the same fate as her husband. The twin-engine propeller plane she was co-piloting crashed about a mile from the landing strip at a newly built airport in Pokhara, a Himalayan vacation destination. Of the 72 people on board, the bodies of 69 had been recovered by Monday, making it the country’s deadliest air disaster in decades.

“Anju’s father had asked her not to choose the pilot profession,” said Gopal Regmi, a relative and close friend of her father’s. “After her husband’s tragic death, she was determined to become a pilot.”

The family’s twin calamities are part of a deadly pattern in Nepal. The small South Asian nation has suffered a series of crashes and other aviation safety lapses in recent decades, a troubling record attributed to difficult terrain and unpredictable weather, as well as inadequate regulation, aging fleets and lagging technical capacity.

Nepal’s government appointed a five-member committee to investigate the latest crash, and the aircraft’s flight data recorder was recovered on Monday. The cause of the disaster was unclear; aviation experts cautioned that only an inquiry could establish the exact reason that the plane, built about 15 years ago by the French-Italian manufacturer ATR, went down.