Iran locates wreckage of crashed plane

Search and rescue teams have now reached the crash site and are working at the scene, Iran’s Press TV reported.

Its latest fatal crash was in 1994, when one of its Fokker F28s en route from Isfahan to Tehran suffered a sudden loss of power and crashed, killing all 66 on board.

“The Revolutionary Guards’ helicopters this morning found the wreckage of the plane on Dena mountain”, spokesman Ramezan Sharif told state broadcaster IRIB. Officials said hundreds of mountaineers, supported by dogs and drones, were operating around the 14,465-foot (4,409-metre) Dena mountain, which is popular with Iranians seeking to prepare for climbing in the Himalayas.

The Aseman Airlines ATR-72, a twin-engine turboprop used for short-distance regional flying, went down on Sunday in foggy weather.

A total of 20 emergency teams were dispatched to the region by the crisis management agencies of Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province, where Yasuj is located, and three adjacent provinces.

“If the conditions are right, the “black box” will be taken out of the plane today and will be delivered to Aseman Airlines”, the semi-official ILNA news agency quoted Masoud As’adi Samani, the secretary of Iran’s Air Society Association, as saying.

“We have asked China and European countries to immediately inform us of any image they might capture with their satellites”, Mojtaba Saradeghi, deputy head of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization, told the Iranian Student News Agency on Monday.

An ATR-72 crashed in similar icy conditions in IN in the United States in 1994, leading some operators to avoid cold weather conditions. One helicopter earlier forced to turn back due to bad weather. Dense fog, high winds and heavy snow in the Zagros Mountains made it impossible for rescue crews in helicopters to reach the site in the immediate aftermath, state television reported.

Home to 80 million people, Iran represents one of the last untapped aviation markets in the world.

Accordingly the airline, the third largest in Iran with 26 aircraft, flies only in and around the Middle East and central Asia.

Todd Curtis, founder of the website AirSafe.com said Iran was able to keep its planes flying despite sanctions that made it more hard to buy parts or new aircraft, but that the aviation sector was not able to benefit from working with others in the industry from around the world.

But figures from the Flight Safety Foundation, a US-based NGO, suggest Iran is nonetheless above-average in implementing ICAO safety standards. However, when Iran brokered the nuclear deal, the US lifted their sanctions in 2016 on aviation purchases enabling Iran to buy new fleets.

Aseman signed a deal in 2017 to buy at least 30 Boeing 737 MAX jets.