Plane nose-dives in Iran, killing all 168 aboard

It was the latest in a string of deadly crashes in recent years that have highlighted Iran’s difficulties in maintaining its aging fleet of planes.

Iranian airlines, including state-run ones, are chronically strapped for cash, and maintenance has suffered, specialists say. US sanctions prevent Iran from updating its 30-year-old American aircraft and make it difficult to get European parts or planes as well. The country has come to rely on Russian aircraft, many of them Soviet-era planes that are harder to get parts for since the Soviet Union’s fall.

The Caspian Airlines Tupolev jet’s impact plowed a deep, long trench into an agricultural field outside the village of Jannat Abad, and the aircraft was blasted to bits. Flaming wreckage and personal items were strewn over a 200-yard area. Firefighters put out blazes from the crash, but smoke smoldered from the pit for hours as emergency workers searched for data recorders and other clues to the cause.

Ali Akbar Hashemi, a 23-year-old, was laying gas pipes in a house by the field when he saw the stricken jet overhead. He said the plane was circling, flames shooting from its tail section.

“Then, I saw the plane crashing nose-down. It hit the ground, causing a big explosion. The impact shook the ground like an earthquake,’’ Hashemi said by phone.

The Tu-154M jet had taken off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport yesterday morning and was headed to the Armenian capital, Yerevan. It crashed at 11:30 a.m. about 16 minutes after takeoff outside Jannat Abad, near the city of Qazvin, about 75 miles northwest of Tehran, Reza Jafarzadeh, civil aviation spokesman, told state media.

At Yerevan’s airport, Tina Karapetian, 45, sobbed and 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 cried before collapsing to the floor.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known.

The plane was carrying 153 passengers and 15 crew members, Jafarzadeh and Arsen Pogosian, deputy chairman of Armenia’s civil aviation authority, said. “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, as well as 11 members of Iran’s national youth judo team. Five Armenian citizens were among the dead, Armenia’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement, along with two Georgians, including a staff member from the Caucasus nation’s embassy in Yerevan.

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 officer told Iran’s semi-official ISNA news agency that several witnesses reported seeing the plane’s tail on fire.

The Tupolev’s three engines are in its tail section. The flames there could indicate “an uncontained engine failure,’’ said Patrick Smith, a pilot and the air travel and safety writer for Salon.com.

But he said it’s too early to tell. The crash’s root cause could be elsewhere, and the flames a sign of a compressor stall caused when the plane went out of control, interrupting airflow through the engine, Smith said.

The crash is Iran’s 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. That crash was a sign of how maintenance problems have also affected Iran’s military.

Caspian Airlines is an Iranian-Russian private joint venture founded in 1993, with a fleet of Tu-154s built between 1989 and 1993. Russia produced 900 Tu-154s until production was halted in 1996.

The average age of Iran’s fleet of aircraft is 22 years, said Masoud Mohajer, an aviation expert in Tehran.

Age itself may not be a problem - jets that are even older are in service around the world - but keeping them maintained is. Mohajer said Iranian airlines can’t afford to keep even Russian planes in shape because of lack of government support.

“Iranian airliners don’t have enough cash even to buy new Russian planes. The government controls ticket prices. It’s not profitable for airliners,’’ Mohajer said.

Some of the jets in Iran’s fleet are US-made craft bought before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, which led to a cutoff in ties between the nations. US sanctions since prevent Iran from buying parts for those planes or new ones.

In December 2005, 115 people were killed when a pre-1979 US-made C-130 plane, crashed into a 10-story building near Tehran’s Mehrabad airport.