By Anand Gurung

Birendra Bahadur Basnet, Managing Director of Buddha Air

Birendra Bahadur Basnet, Managing Director of Buddha Air
A few years earlier I had met Birendra Bahadur Basnet, the Managing Director (MD) of Buddha Air, in a party for the first time. He was already a successful business magnate then. ‘You must come and see me in my office one day,” he had told me. “You must come and we will talk about this.” Apart from the regular talk about the country’s airline industry, what particularly interested me during our conversation was the detailed survey he had carried out of all the households in Danighat V.D.C, his home village, and which he hoped would help him plan suitable programs for its development. But that was it. I hadn’t the chance to go to his office to talk to him about it again.

But all this changed last week when I had the opportunity to meet him for the second time. And this time to write the story of his life – the story of someone who is considered the most successful airline operator in the Nepalese aviation history.

Birendra Bahadur Basnet, fondly addressed as BBB also, is not your regular MD. Unlike the typical sleek, imposing and self-obsessed entrepreneur manning the corporate world, he comes as a very modest (he says he rarely wears suit), and gentle person who believes integrity as the most important of human trait.

“At a young age I started as a farmer in the multipurpose agriculture farm my father had opened up in Danighat,” says the commerce graduate who had wanted to become an engineer but couldn’t because of his poor physics. “For six years I was solely responsible for day to day running of the entire farm and this, I think, honed my business acumen and prepared me for my next venture, starting Buddha air, ” he recounts, talking about the early days when he was studying B.Com in Mahendra Morang Campus at Biratnagar and applying his learning at the farm in the weekends. “I learned an important lesson in business management by making several mistakes. For instance I never compromised in the prices because of which the produce from the farm would not sell,” he remembers .

Before moving any further here’s quick look at his life when he was even younger. Born in Benaras, India 42 years ago, he came to Kathmandu to do his schooling first – from St. Xaviers (Godavari) and then went on to finish his SLC from Budhanilkantha School. The six years of his life after that was very tumultuous, full of many ups and downs. His father, Surendra Bahadur Basnet, a landlord and a senior politician in the Rastriya Prajatantra Party wanted his son to make a career in engineering, and so BBB joined Amrit Science College. But soon he found that science was not his forte, and he dropped out from the college. He then went on to Benaras where he joined Intermediate in Commerce as a private student, passed out, and came to Nepal to help his father run the multipurpose farm. Here he spent the six most formative years of his life.

Then in the year 1991 he left the farm and came to Kathmandu where he joined MA in economics. The farm not doing quite as expected despite his efforts all these years was partly the reason why he took this bold decision. “But now the important thing was the next step. I was married and my first child was already born. I had to do something to earn a livelihood for my family, so I teamed up with a friend and started a business dealing with export of handicraft products.” However, he left this as well when his partner breached the contract.

The combination of good teamwork and technology helped Buddha Air reach the place where it is today and my belief in transparency in financial matters and in airline business, regular maintenance.
– Birendra B. Basnet
At this time Birendra’s family was already in a huge financial mess. After a failed business venture in commercial farming, the Basnets owed the banks lot of money and had started selling their land in Biratnagar to clear the debt and ward off the financial crunch. Now again Birendra was at the cross roads, he needed to start all over again. But he didn’t had any business plan in mind. And that’s about the time when his younger brother Sivendra Basnet returned from Ukraine after completing helicopter pilot training and had just joined a helicopter company.

“My brother was working as a pilot with a helicopter company and I was just making time working in an NGO. I knew I had to go into business soon because that’s what I was doing all this time. But I didn’t had the kind of cash to start something of my own. And that’s when my brother proposed that we start a helicopter company as he saw good business prospects in it.” And that’s how it all started. After convincing their father for it, the brothers found two other partners, and named the company Buddha Air. The year was 1996

“We had estimated the total investment required would be Rs 10 million. So each of us put in Rs. 800,000 to start the business and started looking for helicopters.” That’s about the time when the government changed the rule that the MI-17 helicopters would only be allowed to ferry goods and not operate passenger services. This sudden decision of the government spelled disaster for the company even before it came into operation. But again this shall prove to be a fortunate misfortune for him and a major turning point in his life, as we will come to know later.

Promotional material showing a Buddha Air plane.
(File Photo)

So, Birendra and his partners were faced with a dilemma – either move ahead or close down the company. Then a distant cousin of Birendra, a pilot with RNAC (and now runs Sita Airlines), suggested him to go into airlines business and recommended brand new Beech 1900 D aircrafts that had just been introduced in the world market and was technologically the most advanced. But there was a hitch again and the hitch was getting the finances, because running an airlines company was an altogether different ball game if one is to take into account the project cost.

“When we moved ahead with the project it was a very bad time for the aviation sector of Nepal. Nepal Airways had just collapsed and the banks were very skeptical about financing new airlines,” Birendra said. And to make the bad scheme of things worse his two partners wanted out. So, the Basnets had no option but to pay them what they had invested. They were now all on their own

And, since the Beech 1900 D’s were very expensive aircraft, he was having a tough time in convincing the banks to finance his company. But fortunately someone he knew at the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) offered to help. “After much negotiation and feasibility studies EPF and Nepal Credit and Commerce Bank finally agreed to grant us the loan. It was indeed a miracle, rarely do banks sanction loans to people who don’t have much knowledge or expertise of the business.” And that’s how his and Buddha Air’s success story started. One thing led to another and the rest, as they say, is history.

Starting out with just one brand new Beech 1900D aircraft worth US$ 5 million, the airlines currently has six aircraft flying to major destinations of the country as well as operating a mountain flight. Today, Buddha Air is the market leader in domestic flight, commanding more than 50 percent of the domestic air travel market in terms of passenger number. And in a market where many airlines companies have exemplified the phrase ‘Here today, Gone tomorrow’ (Nepal Airways, Necon Air, for instance) Buddha Air is still flying high.

So what is the secret behind the success of Buddha Air? “The combination of good teamwork and technology helped it reach to the place where it is today,” says this father of two daughters, adding, “that and my belief in transparency in financial matters and in airline business, regular maintenance.”

Do you think you have reached to that stage of life where you can look back and be proud of what you have achieved? “In five or seven years time I would have achieved everything I want of my life. Regarding Buddha Air, however, I have already completed my responsibility. Buddha Air is already established, now we need to diversify into new sectors. We are now thinking of starting up another airline company that would operate exclusively in the remote areas. We are just looking at country’s political situation; once it stabilizes we would move ahead with that also.” Good luck!