TEHRAN: A Russian-made Iranian passenger plane carrying 157 passengers and 13 crew members crash-landed in northeastern Iran on Sunday injuring at least 46 people, state television reported.
The broadcast quoted Iran’s civil aviation spokesman, Reza Jafarzadeh, as saying that no one was killed in the accident. He gave no indication of what might have caused the accident.
The Taban Air plane caught fire upon landing at Mashhad airport at 7:20 a.m. local time. The injured have been taken to hospitals in Mashhad, the report added.
Jafarzadeh said the Tupolev plane initially took off from Abadan airport in southwestern Iran Saturday evening but landed in Isfahan, central Iran, because of bad weather in Mashhad, its destination.
“The plane took off from Isfahan airport at 5:35 a.m. local time Sunday ... despite bad weather and minimum visibility, the pilot made an emergency landing because a passenger was ill. But the incident then happened during landing,” he said.
Jafarzadeh said the plane was seriously damaged. State television added that part of the aircraft had burned and the left wing and undercarriage were torn off.
Iran has about a dozen Soviet-built Tupolev airliners.
Russia’s Federal Air Transport Agency said it will investigate the reasons behind the fire and said “weather conditions and visibility problems were most likely behind the incident,” state-run news agency RIA-Novosti reported. “The airplane touched the ground with a large load, resulting in part of the runway being damaged,” it said.
In the worst plane crash in Iran in the past six years, a Tupolev aircraft crashed in 2009 in Iran on its way to Armenia, after catching fire in midair and crashing into farmland killing all 168 people on board.
Iran has suffered a string of crashes in the past few decades, many involving Russian-made aircraft. US sanctions against Iran have prevented it from buying new aircraft or spare parts from the West, forcing it to add to its aging fleet of Boeing and Airbus planes with aircraft from Russia and other former Soviet Union states.
