California man's decade-long aircraft project for Nepal children destroyed in theft and arson

Anis Pradhan stood in an industrial lot in Long Beach on a January Saturday and looked at what remained of ten years of work. The 1948 Piper aircraft—a silver plane he had spent over a quarter-million dollars rebuilding—was now a blackened skeleton. The metal had been stripped for scrap. The parts were gone. Only the trailer frame sat charred on the ground.

Two weeks earlier, on the evening of January 3rd, a white van had pulled into a parking lot in unincorporated Torrance and hitched an Airstream trailer carrying the plane. The theft happened around 8:15 p.m. from a lot on Lockness Avenue. Pradhan had been storing the aircraft there while preparing it for a journey that was supposed to happen in March—a flight to Nepal to teach underprivileged children about careers in aircraft maintenance and commercial piloting.

Pradhan is a certified flight instructor with roughly twenty years of experience. He runs flight training and aircraft rentals at Zamperini Field. But this project was different. It was personal. He had immigrated to the United States from Nepal as a teenager, and he wanted to return with something that could change the trajectory of children's lives in a country he described as among the world's poorest. The plane was meant to be more than a teaching tool. It was meant to be a bridge—a way for kids without resources to imagine themselves as pilots, as mechanics, as people who could rise above poverty.

For a decade, Pradhan had poured himself into this work. He worked seven days a week to support it. He invested more than $250,000 of his own money. The aircraft had been stored at his brother's warehouse in preparation for the shipment overseas. It was uninsured. When the theft happened, everything he had built toward that March departure date vanished.

Los Angeles police had not identified suspects by the time the story broke. Pradhan told officers he had noticed a group of people lingering around the parking lot in the days before the theft. The plane was found burned on January 13th, five days after it disappeared, in an industrial area near 17th Street and Daisy Avenue in Long Beach. By then, the damage was total.

"By the time I got there, it was just the charred remains," Pradhan said. "All the metal had been scrapped and parts had been stripped clean. Just the bottom frame of the trailer was left." He described himself as scattered, overwhelmed by the loss. "I lost all investment towards this project," he said. "I work seven days a week to support this project and it went up in smoke because of some greedy people."

Without the plane, without the insurance, without the timeline he had built his life around, Pradhan faced a choice. He could wait another decade. Or he could ask for help. He set up a GoFundMe campaign, hoping to restart what had been stolen from him. "I can't wait another 10 years to get this project running," he said. The children in Nepal were waiting. The opportunity was waiting. And now, so was he.