AT LEAST 160 KILLED AS PASSENGER JET CRASHES IN IRAN
Times Online
July 15, 2009
Debris from the Caspian Airlines flight
Nico Hines and Charles Bremner Recommend? (56) More than 160 people
are feared dead in Iran today after a passenger plane crashed in
farmland in the northwest of the country.
The impact gouged a deep trench in the field, which could be seen
littered with wreckage in footage shown on state TV. A large chunk
of smouldering wing was seen but most of the plane appeared to have
been smashed into tiny pieces
An aviation official said that there were 153 passengers and 15 crew
on the Caspian Airlines flight from Tehran to Yerevan, the capital
of Armenia.
Local media reports claim that Iran’s national youth judo team,
along with two trainers and a delegation chief, were on the plane.
A Caspian Airlines representative in Yerevan said that most of the
passengers were Armenians, and that some Georgian citizens were also
on board.
The plane, reported to be a Russian-built Tupolev, crashed near the
city of Qazvin, northwest of the capital, just 16 minutes after take
off from Tehran’s international airport.
Masoud Jafari Nasab, the Qazvin police chief, said: "The passenger
plane was completed destroyed and the wreckage was scattered
everywhere. Most probably all passengers on board have been killed
in the crash." He added that the plane had cr ashed in fields near
the village of Janat Abad.
Caspian Airlines is a Russian-Iranian joint venture founded in
1993. Iran has frequent plane crashes often because of bad maintenance
of its aging aircraft. Tehran blames the problem in part on US
sanctions that prevent Iran from getting spare parts for some planes.
Caspian Airlines, however, uses Russian-made Tupolevs whose maintenance
should not be impaired by American sanctions.
The third major airliner disaster in seven weeks has brought to 548
the number of deaths in accidents so far this year. Last year the
worldwide total was 577 and in 2007 it was 865, according to Aviation
Safety Network.
There was no immediate indication of what went wrong aboard the Caspian
Airlines Tupolev as it climbed towards cruising altitude after take-off
from Teheran airport. Some reports said the crew reported a problem
and that the aircraft was attempting to return it lost control and
hit the ground.
The long traces on the crash scene suggested that the aircraft did not
fall vertically but was still in forward motion when it came down. This
could indicate that it did not explode or break up before crashing
and that the pilots may have had some control of the stricken aircraft.
The Tupolev 154 is the last version of a Soviet-era mid-range airliner
that in the 1970s and 1980s became the work-horse of Aeroflot, the
Russian airline and some two-dozen dozen other=2 0companies in the
former Soviet Union, eastern Europe and Iran.
Hundreds of the three-engine aircraft, built to sturdy standards
for Russia’s rustic flying conditions, were put into service up to
the late 1990s. The Tu-154, known as the Careless in the Cold War
code of the Nato alliance, took many of its design ideas from the
now obsolete British Trident of the late 1960s and the Boeing 727,
with their three tail-mounted engines and swept back wings.
About 40 Tu-154s have been involved in fatal crashes, a rate in
keeping with other Soviet-era jets, which were less reliable than
western airliners. Most of the crashes were blamed on error by the
pilots. Before today’s disaster, seven have crashed in the past decade,
two of them Iranian. In September 2006, 29 passengers died when an
Iran Air Tours Tupolev 154 skidded off the runway as it was landing
in Mashhad and caught fire.
In February 2002, Iran Air Tours Tu-154 hit the Sefid Kouh mountains
outside Khorramabad, killing all 125 aboard.
The Tu-154M of Caspian airlines was a version brought out in the late
1980s with modern turbo-fan engines and western-standard electronics
and other systems. Its basic technology, however, descended from
the rough-and-ready Soviet military-run aviation industry of the
early 1970s.