...

High speed blamed for Mashhad air crash

Iran Materials 26 July 2009 09:59 (UTC +04:00)
High speed blamed for Mashhad air crash

A senior Iranian aviation official has placed the blame for the fatal airline mishap in the northeastern city of Mashhad on high speed, a report says, Press TV reported.

In an interview with IRIB Channel 2 on Saturday, the Chairman of Iran's Civil Aviation Organization, Ali Ilkhani stated that preliminary investigation results indicate that the high speed of the plane at the time of landing was one of the main causes underlying the fatal accident.

He noted that the high speed of the aircraft pushed it to skid off the runway and hit a wall during a landing at Mashhad's Hasheminejad International Airport on Friday.

Given its operation manual, the Russian-made passenger jet should have had made the landing at a speed of 145 to 165 nautical miles. This is while radar data suggest that the airliner was moving at a velocity of 197 nautical miles when it veered off the runway and into a wall.

Seventeen people were killed in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad on Friday when a passenger plane, a Russian built Ilyushin Il-62 owned by Kazakhstan and leased by Iran's Aria Aviation Company, slid off the runway and hit a wall as it tried to make an emergency landing.

As many as 30 other people were injured in the accident and were taken to nearby hospitals to receive treatment. There were 153 people on board the aircraft, which had flown to Mashhad from Tehran.

The incident was the second major airline mishap to have befallen Iran in less than 10 days.

On July 15, a Russian-made Tupolev carrying 153 passengers and 15 crewmembers nosedived into a field outside the village of Jannat Abad near Iran's Qazvin province. The crash took place about 16 minutes after the Tu-154M jet had taken off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport and was en route to Yerevan, Armenia. All 168 people that were on board were killed.

Latest

Latest