I'm Sagar Bhandari (सागर भण्डारी / 晩田里 青河).
I'm an aerospace engineer, currently a Service Engineer at Leonardo Helicopters in Auckland, supporting continuing airworthiness, maintenance safety, and technical investigation across the AW109, AW119, AW139, AW169, and AW189 fleets in Australia and New Zealand.
My path here wasn't linear. I trained in aerospace and mechanical engineering at Tohoku University, with an exchange year at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. After my Bachelor's, I worked with Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) on active flow control for wings using plasma actuators, presenting the findings at national and international conferences — that research became my Master's thesis. From there I joined Leonardo Helicopters (AgustaWestland) in Tokyo as a service and aerospace engineer, supporting the Japanese police and Japan Coast Guard along with other smaller operators, before relocating to New Zealand to support the company's Australia and New Zealand fleet. Somewhere through those years I also founded Youki, a venture that industrialised Nepali leaf plates into biodegradable utensils, which placed in the Top 10 of Tokyo Startup Gateway.
What ties it together is a habit of going deep into how systems actually work — mechanically, regulatorily, organisationally — and then trying to make them safer or more resilient. That's the thread running from research wings in a wind tunnel, to the AW139 pictured here at Leonardo's Vergiate facility in Italy, to the regulatory work I now do for Nepal's aviation sector through Yantra Aviation.
Nepal is where most of this is heading. I'm building toward a return — first through aviation, and in parallel through Kodo Adventure, an overlanding venture rooted in the Himalaya. I write about both, along with travel and the occasional detour into philosophy, on the writing page.