PILOT ERROR MAY HAVE CAUSED IRAN PLANE CRASH – ARMENIAN OFFICIAL

RIA Novosti
16:5217/07/2009

YEREVAN, July 17 (RIA Novosti) – The crash of an Iranian Tu-154
passenger plane on Wednesday could have been caused by a pilot error,
an Armenian civil aviation official said on Friday.

The Russian-made Tupolev plane owned by Caspian Airlines was en
route from Tehran to the Armenian capital, Yerevan, when it crashed
soon after takeoff on a farm in the Qazvin province, killing all 168
people on board.

Dmitry Adbashyan, president of Armenia’s National Aviation Association,
said that even though witness accounts indicate that the plane had
one or two engines on fire before it hit the ground, it could still
fly with the remaining third engine.

He drew parallels with a similar accident involving the Tu-154 in
Krasnoyarsk, eastern Siberia, in the 1980s, when the pilot detected
flames in one engine but mistakenly switched off another engine and
started fire extinguishing procedures, resulting in a crash that
could have been avoided.

At the same time, the official did not dismiss other possible causes
of the Wednesday crash, including an unexpected sand storm or even
an act of terrorism.

Rescuers at the crash site have recovered the three "black boxes"
belonging to the aircraft. The flight recorders were badly damaged
but could help investigators to identify the cause of the accident.

Iranian authorities said on Thursday the crashed Tu-154M was built in
1987, bought by Iran in 1998, and had an overhaul certificate valid
until 2010.