168 Killed in Iran Plane Crash
Source: The Associated Press
Posted: 07/15/09 10:51AM
Filed Under: World
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - A Russian-made Iranian passenger plane carrying 168 people crashed shortly after takeoff Wednesday, smashing into a field northwest of the capital and shattering into flaming pieces. All on board were killed in Iran's worst air disaster in six years, officials said.
Troubles in the Air
In this photo released by the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), an unidentified man observes the scene of a plane crash near the village of Jannatabad, outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran in Iran, Wednesday, July 15, 2009. An Iranian passenger plane carrying 168 people crashed a quarter-hour after takeoff Wednesday, smashing into a field northwest of the capital and shattering to pieces, with State television saying all on board were killed.
AP Photo/ISNA, Sina Shiri
In this photo released by the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), people gather at the scene of a plane crash near the village of Jannatabad, outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran in Iran, Wednesday, July 15, 2009. An Iranian passenger plane carrying 168 people crashed a quarter-hour after takeoff Wednesday, smashing into a field northwest of the capital and shattering to pieces, with State television saying all on board were killed.
AP Photo/ISNA, Sina Shiri
In this photo released by the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), a rescue worker attends to the scene of a plane crash near the village of Jannatabad, outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran in Iran, Wednesday, July 15, 2009. An Iranian passenger plane carrying 168 people crashed a quarter-hour after takeoff Wednesday, smashing into a field northwest of the capital and shattering to pieces, with State television saying all on board were killed.
AP Photo/ISNA, Sina Shiri
This image made from television broadcast by Iran's Press TV, Wednesday, July 15, 2009, they say shows a deep trench into an agricultural field caused by the impact of a crashed Iranain passenger plane a Russian-made Caspian Airlines jet that crashed Wednesday in northwest Iran, killing all 168 people on board, state media reported. The Russian-made Caspian Airlines jet was heading from Tehran to the Armenian capital Yerevan when it crashed near the village of Jannatabad outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran, state television said.
AP Photo/Press TV
This image made from television broadcast by Iran's Press TV, Wednesday, July 15, 2009, shows they say wreckage from a crashed Iranain passenger plane, a Russian-made Caspian Airlines jet that crashed Wednesday in northwest Iran, killing all 168 people on board, state media reported. The Russian-made Caspian Airlines jet was heading from Tehran to the Armenian capital Yerevan when it crashed near the village of Jannatabad outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran, state television said.
AP Photo/Press TV
A 1-foot-by-1-foot hole opened up in the passenger cabin of this Southwest Airlines plane on Monday, July 13, 2009, forcing the 737 aircraft to make an emergency landing in West Virginia. The cabin lost pressure, but none of the 131 people on board were injured. The flight was traveling from Nashville to Baltimore.
WSAZ
An investigator looks at a hole on top of a Southwest Airlines plane which had to make an emergency landing in Charleston, W.V., Monday, July 13, 2009. Southwest Airlines ordered inspections of nearly 200 aircraft after a football-sized hole opened up in the passenger cabin of a plane during flight, forcing an emergency landing in West Virginia. Travelers on the 737 aircraft could see outside through the 1-foot-by-1-foot hole that appeared during the flight Monday. The cabin lost pressure, but no one was injured on the Nashville to Baltimore flight with 126 passengers and five crew members on board.
AP Photo/The Charleston Gazette, Chris Dorst
Passenger Brian Cunningham told the 'Today' show that the tear in the fuselage was "the loudest roar I'd ever heard." It remains unclear what caused the incident. Here, the damaged plane sits on the tarmac at Yeager Airport in Charleston, W. Va.
WSAZ
"After we landed in Charleston, the pilot came out and looked up through the hole, and everybody applauded, shook his hand, a couple of people gave him hugs," Cunningham said. The airline announced all of its 737-300s will be inspected as a precaution. Here, fliers wait in line at Yeager Airport. (Source: AP)
WSAZ
A similar incident forced the landing of another plane July 25, 2008. In this file photo, the damaged fuselage of the right wing of Qantas Airways Boeing 747-400 is seen after it made an emergency landing in Manila, Philippines.
AP Photo/Ninoy Aquino International Airport, Edwin Loobrera/FILE
Before crashing, the plane's tail was on fire as it circled in the air, one witness told The Associated Press.
"Then, I saw the plane crashing nose-down. It hit the ground causing a big explosion. The impact shook the ground like an earthquake. Then, plane pieces were scattered all over the agricultural fields," Ali Akbar Hashemi, a 23-year-old who was laying gas pipes in a nearby home, told AP by phone.
The impact blasted a deep trench in the dirt field, which was littered with smoking wreckage, body parts and personal items from the Tupolev jet, according to photos from the scene. Firefighters put out the flaming wreckage, which officials said was strewn over a 200 yard (meter) area. A large chunk of a wing was visible in footage of the scene, but much of the wreckage appeared to be in small shreds.
Iran has seen numerous crashes in recent years, usually blamed on poor maintenance. Iranian officials often blame U.S. sanctions that prevent it from updating American aircraft bought before the 1979 Islamic revolution and make it difficult to get European spare parts or planes as well.
Iranian airlines and the military have turned increasingly to Russian aircraft, which are not effected by sanctions, but have seen a string of accidents. Two other Tupolev crashes in Iran this decade have killed nearly 140 people.
Air Accidents
An Indonesian air force plane carrying soldiers and their families crashed in a residential neighborhood in Magetan, Indonesia, May 20, killing at least 98 people. Witnesses described seeing the right wing of the C-130 Hercules plane snap off while it was in flight. "I heard at least two big explosions and saw flashes of fire inside the plane," one witness said.
Reuters
An Air France plane carrying 228 people went down in the Atlantic Ocean after running into violent weather on May 31. The Airbus A330-200 had been en route from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris.
Forca Aerea Brasileira / LatinContent / Getty Images
A small plane slammed into a home after taking off from the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport in Florida on April 17. The pilot had reported a problem and was on his way back to the airport when he crashed. The accident killed the 80-year-old pilot and destroyed the house, but no one on the ground was hurt.
Mark Randall, South Florida Sun-Sentinel / MCT
A FedEx cargo plane en route from China crashed and burned amid high winds at Japan's Narita International Airport on March 23. Both pilots of the MD-11 died. The photo above shows the remains of the plane on the runway.
AFP / Getty Images
Flames and billowing smoke rise after a small plane crashed in a cemetery in Butte, Mont., March 22, killing 14 people on board, including seven children, an FAA spokesman said. The single engine turboprop plane was just 500 feet from the airport and was attempting to land when it went down.
Martha Guidoni, Montana Standard / Reuters
A mountain flying instructor and author of the "Mountain Flying Bible and Flight Operations Handbook" crashed his single-engine Cessna near a small Montana airstrip March 19. Sparky Imeson was headed to Helena, Mont.
Nick Wolcott, Bozeman Daily Chronicle / AP
A Turkish Airlines jet crashed in a field near Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport on Feb. 25, breaking into three pieces and killing nine.
Toussaint Kluiters, Reuters
Flames rise from the wreckage of Continental Connection Flight 3407 in Clarence Center, N.Y. The commuter flight crashed into a house near the Buffalo airport on Feb. 13, killing all 49 people on board and one person on the ground.
Gary Wiepert, Reuters
A twin-engine business plane en route from Vienna crashed into a snow wall as it tried to land at a Swiss airport Feb. 12. Two people died and a third was seriously injured. Here, workers recover part of the wreckage.
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A chartered plane crashed in a muddy Amazon river on Feb. 7, killing 24 of the people on board. Four people were able to open an emergency door and swim to safety. Most of the victims were members of a family that had rented the plane to go to a birthday party.
Adalto Silva, Folha Imagem/AP
The Caspian Airlines Tu-154M jet had taken off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport on Wednesday morning and was headed to the Armenian capital Yerevan. It crashed at 11:30 am about 16 minutes after takeoff near the village of Jannat Abad outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran, civil aviation spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh told state media.
At Yerevan's airport, Tina Karapetian, 45, said she had been waiting for her sister and the sister's 6- and 11-year-old sons, who were due on the flight. "What will I do without them?" she said, weeping, before she collapsed to the floor.
The cause of the crash was not immediately known. Hossein Ayaznia, an aviation police official, said emergency workers were searching for the plane's data recorders to get evidence of the cause.
Iran's Jafarzadeh and the deputy chairman of Armenia's civil aviation authority Arsen Pogosian said there were 153 passengers and 15 crewmembers on board the plane. "In all likelihood, all on board were killed," Pogosian told reporters at Yerevan airport.
Most of the passengers were Iranians, many of them from Iran's large ethnic Armenian community, along with six Armenian citizens and two Georgian citizens, Pogosian said. The two Georgians included a staffer from the Caucasus nation's embassy in Yerevan, Georgia's military attache in the Armenian capital said.
Serob Karapetian, the chief of Yerevan airport's aviation security service, said the plane may have attempted an emergency landing, but reports that it caught fire in the air were "only one version." He did not elaborate. A police official told Iran's semi-official ISNA news agency that several witnesses reported seeing the plane's tail on fire in the air as it circled to find a place to land.
The plane was completely destroyed in the crash and shattered to pieces, Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Behzadpour told the state news agency IRNA.
"The force of the crash was so serious that pieces of the aircraft were thrown over a 200 meter area. Unfortunately, all the bodies were totally destroyed," Behzadpour said.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a statement expressing condolences for the deaths and urging a swift investigation of the cause.
Also among the passengers were eight members of Iran's national youth judo team, along with two trainers and a delegation chief, who were scheduled to train with the Armenian judo team before attending competitions in Hungary on Aug. 6, state TV said.
The crash is the worst since February 2003, when a Russian-made Ilyushin 76 carrying members of the elite Revolutionary Guards crashed in the mountains of southeastern Iran, killing 302 people aboard.
Caspian Airlines is an Iranian-Russian joint venture founded in 1993 whose fleet is made up of Tupolevs.
In February 2006, a Russian-made Tu-154 operated by Iran Airtour, which is affiliated with Iran's national carrier, crashed during landing in Tehran, killing 29 of the 148 people on board. Another Airtour Tupolev crashed in 2002 in the mountains of western Iran, killing all 199 on board.
The crashes have also affected Iran's military. In December 2005, 115 people were killed when a pre-1979 U.S.-made C-130 plane, crashed into a 10-story building near Tehran's Mehrabad airport. In Nov. 2007, a Russian-made Iranian military plane crashed shortly after takeoff killing 36 Revolutionary Guards members.
AP writer Avet Demourian in Yerevan, Armenia, contributed to this report.
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