The Ukraine International Airlines (UIA) disaster on January 8, when flight PS-752 crashed soon after takeoff from Tehran with the loss of all 176 passengers and crew on board, reinforces Iran’s poor record when it comes to aviation safety.
The cause of the tragic episode remains in doubt for now. The Boeing 737-800 aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from Imam Khomeini International Airport, heading for the Ukrainian capital Kiev. Initial reports from Iran stated the plane had crashed after an engine caught fire, but suspicions of something even more concerning soon emerged.
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau said the following day that intelligence from Canadian and other sources pointed to the plane being hit by a missile, albeit perhaps unintentionally. Later that day, aviation safety experts at OppsGroup changed their view on whether the plane was shot down from “possible” to “very probable”.
Iranian officials maintain the plane was not hit by a missile. The head of the Civil Aviation Organization of Iran has urged the world to wait until investigators have completed their work.
Nonetheless, the working assumption for most in the industry is that the plane was shot out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile (SAM) while climbing away from Tehran – not least because of apparent video footage of the incident emerging and the discovery of anti-aircraft missile debris allegedly found near the crash site.
Just who might have fired the missile and why remain matters of conjecture, however. Justin Bronk, a research fellow at the UK defense think-tank the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), points out that “Iran has no reason to want to make its own airspace seem unsafe for civil air traffic”. He suggests the most likely culprit is “a badly trained or inexperienced crew” of the Russian-made SA-15 Tor M-1 SAM system based near Mehrabad Airbase on the outskirts of Tehran who “made a series of tragic and incorrect assumptions.”
The incident draws fresh attention to Iran’s poor safety record which, by most measures, is the worst in the Middle East region.
There have now been 22 fatal air accidents in the country since 2000, according to the Aviation Safety Network (ASN). In records that go back to 1919, the ASN has recorded 152 air accidents in Iran, far ahead of the second-worst country Egypt which has suffered 126 incidents over that time.
Including the UIA disaster, there have now been 63 incidents involving fatalities in Iran, with a total loss of life of 2,152. Only two other countries in the region have seen more than 1,000 deaths from air accidents, with Saudi Arabia suffering 1,019 deaths and Morocco 1,016.
The countries with the best air safety record in the Middle East include Qatar which has had the fewest incidents at just six. It and Kuwait have both had just one incident involving a fatality and Kuwait has the lowest aviation death toll in the region with just four fatalities.
The UIA crash is the worst in Iran since February 2003, when 275 people died when a Russian-built Ilyushin Il-76MD carrying Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp personnel crashed into a mountain near the city of Kerman during strong winds.
One particular problem for the Iranian aviation sector – although not relevant in the case of the UIA crash – is the impact of U.S. sanctions on the country. This has prevented local airlines from buying newer aircraft or even accessing spare parts. As a result, airlines have had to strip some planes for parts and many of the aircraft flying in Iran today are relatively old. According to Airfleets.net, the average age of aircraft used by leading airlines such as Iran Air and Mahan Air is often well over 20 years and in some cases more than 30 years. www.forbes.com/