IRAN PLANE BLACK BOXES ‘DAMAGED’
BBC NEWS
iddle_east/8153069.stm
2009/07/15 22:19:11 GMT
Damaged black boxes have been recovered from a Caspian Airlines plane
that crashed in north Iran with the loss of all 168 people on board,
say officials.
Investigators who scoured scattered body parts and metal fragments
for the data recorders hope they will salvage a clue as to the cause
of the crash.
The wreckage was spread over a large area of farmland in Qazvin
province, 120km (75 miles) north-west of Tehran.
The Tupolev plane was flying from the Iranian capital to Yerevan
in Armenia.
Witnesses said the 22-year-old Russian-made aircraft, which had 153
passengers and 15 crew, nose-dived from the sky with its tail on fire.
Flight 7908 crashed 16 minutes after take-off from Imam Khomeini
International Airport in Tehran, officials said.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered his condolences to the
bereaved families and ordered a transport ministry investigation into
the tragedy.
‘Heads, fingers, passports’
Farsi Majidi, head of the investigating committee, told Associated
Press TV News: "Thank God, we succeeded in finding two of the three
flight data recorders or black boxes.
ANALYSIS Jon Leyne, BBC News Iran has a notoriously bad air safety
record. Because of sanctions imposed by the United States, Iran
relies on an increasingly ageing fleet of airliners, and has trouble
buying spares.
There are tales of aircrew buying spare parts on flights to Europe,
then sneaking them back to Iran in the cockpit. While those sanctions
don’t apply to aircraft from Russia and Ukraine, many planes from
those countries in the Iranian fleet also appear well past their best.
For some people, flying in Iran can be a nerve-wracking
experience. Stepping on board, it often becomes quickly apparent you
are in a plane that has done many years service.
There are also frequent delays because of the shortage of
aircraft. Iranian engineers and aircrew do their best to keep their
fleets in service.
"Although they are damaged we are hopeful that we can extract
information from them."
Eight members of Iran’s national junior judo team and two coaches
were on the flight, heading for training with the Armenian team.
Among the mainly Iranian passengers were about five Armenian citizens
and two Georgians.
Search teams picked through an area 200m (660ft) wide in a field at
Jannatabad village, where the plane gouged out a huge smoking crater.
A relief worker, standing next to a body bag of human flesh, told
AFP news agency: "There is not a single piece which can be identified."
Mostafa Babashahverdi, a local farmer, told Reuters news agency:
"We found severed heads, fingers and passports of the passengers."
Witnesses said the Tu-154 had circled briefly looking for an emergency
landing site. One man described it exploding on impact.
"I saw the plane crashing nose-down. It hit the ground causing a big
explosion. The impact shook the ground like an earthquake," Ali Akbar
Hashemi told AP news agency.
IRANIAN PLANE CRASHES
Feb 2006: Tupolev crashes in Tehran, kills 29 people Dec 2005:
C-130 military plane crashes near Tehran, kills 110 Feb 2003:
Iranian military plane crashes, kills all 276 on board Feb 2002:
Tupolev crashes in west Iran, kills all 199 on board
At Yerevan’s airport, one woman wept as she said her sister and two
nephews, aged six and 11, had been on the flight.
"What will I do without them?" said Tina Karapetian, 45, before
collapsing.
It was the third deadly crash of a Tupolev Tu-154 in Iran since 2002.
The BBC’s Jon Leyne says Iran’s civil and military air fleets are
made up of elderly aircraft, in poor condition due to their age and
lack of maintenance.
Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, trade embargoes by Western
nations have forced Iran to buy mainly Russian-built planes to
supplement an existing fleet of Boeings and other American and
European models.
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress