Suneera Regmi, Nepal’s first woman aerospace engineer, is still a rare female in a male-dominated arena.  

Regmi’s fascination with airplanes started young. Her uncle, who worked for Nepal Airlines Corporation (NAC), used to take her to the airport.

“Seeing planes fly, I wondered how it was even possible,” she recalls. That curiosity would one day propel her into the rarefied field of aerospace engineering.

It was at Little Angels’ School in Hattiban, Lalitpur that she developed her love for math and physics. The two subjects, she says, helped her make sense of the world and everyday things happening all around. 

“When we were taught about gravity for the first time at school, I remember wondering how an aircraft could defy a force that tries to confine us to the ground,” says Regmi, who is now 34.

After completing school, Regmi went to India for higher education. She studied math and physics at Vivekananda Junior College in Tenali, Andhra Pradesh.

When she returned home after two years, Buddha Air had just announced a new cadet pilot training course. Regmi jumped at the opportunity and signed up for the course that also promised a guaranteed job.   

Nine trainees, including Regmi, were selected for the course. But the training was too expensive for her family. Regmi realized that her dream of becoming a pilot would not come true. But she remained unfazed and started exploring other career options within aviation.

Regmi shifted her focus and now decided to get a BTech degree in aerospace engineering. With that intent, she enrolled at the National Institute of Aeronautical Engineering in Dehradun, India.

Regmi says she was the only woman in her class to specialize in aeronautical engineering. In 2008, she returned home with her engineering degree and began an internship in the maintenance section of the NAC.

Regmi was 22 at the time. Back then, she says, Nepal’s aviation industry rarely opened job vacancies for aeronautical engineers.

“Around that time, my college friends were being hired around the world as aeronautical engineers. I, on the other hand, was working as an intern and getting increasingly hopeless,” she says.

Regmi wanted to get a license as an aviation maintenance engineer and work in the country’s aviation sector, but things were not panning out as she planned—until they did.

After interning for a year, the NAC called for a vacancy for an operational engineer, the first time it had done so in 18 years. Of the 23 applicants, Regmi was the only female.

“Even the examiner didn’t believe that I had come for the test,” Regmi says with a laugh. That was when she discovered that she was the first Nepali woman to apply for the position.

Regmi, who was 23 at the time, got the job, thus becoming her country’s first hired woman aerospace engineer. Her heart soared like a hawk when she broke into what was considered a male bastion.

“Being the only woman in the job certainly presents some challenges, but you must remember that you are a professional,” she says.  

Regmi worked as an operational engineer for five years before taking a study leave to pursue her Master’s. In 2015, she was selected for an M. Tech. course at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai, India.

Regmi completed the course and upon her return to Nepal, she was promoted to the post of senior flight operation engineer. She became the deputy director of flight operational engineering at NAC in December 2021.

Regmi worked as the only woman aeronautical engineer at the NAC for a decade before another one was hired. She wants more women to join engineering and other technical fields, where women representation—and not just in Nepal—is dismal. 

“There are still many professions that are dominated by men,” she says. “We should strive to change the concept of such gendered jobs.”

To increase the number of women professionals in technical fields, there is a need to pique the interest of girls and young women in these fields and provide them proper education, she suggests.   

“I am glad I chose this profession. My love for the job I do drives me on, to do better,” says Regmi. “I want other women to pursue their dreams too. They do come true.”