Better Buy Boeing

[RWebb]

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-07-15-voa3.cfm

Iranian airliner crashes & kills everyone aboard...

It was a Russian Tupolev that is not considered airworthy for W. Europe.

[Zef]

I doubt that any Tupolev A/C can be considered airworthy...

[Dantilla]

My wife took a few Aeroflot flights a couple years ago. Quite the experience. I doubt the FAA would approve.

[varmint]

is that a crater? looks at least 15 foot deep. didn't think a passenger plane had enough mass to cause that. maybe it's a natural ditch.

[ZAMIRZ]

I've flown my fair share of domestic flights in Iran back in the '90s. Old planes, cowboy pilots, really a life and death adventure that I don't care for anymore. I flew mostly boeing and airbus. Their boeing fleet make you feel very nostalgic, hardly any of them have been updated since the revolution. Wild interior colors (we're talking viper green, signal orange and bahama yellow seat fabric with brown plastic galleys and off-white walls and overhead bins) and very loud inside too with lots of creaks and groans from the airframe.

One time, we were coming back from Tabriz to Tehran / Mehrabad Int'l (which has now been relegated to mostly domestic flights and service to Mecca, Imam Khomeini is the new Int'l airport that services Tehran) and I guess one of the engines went out. The pilot just came on the intercom and told us one engine is out, but not to worry, he has flown this plane on only one engine before. He set it down on that broke-ass Mehrabad runway perfectly. I was a kid at the time and thought it was kind of adventurous, no way in hell I'd want to do it again.

Another time we were landing in Shiraz from Esfahan and I look out the window to see us passing the runway at a fairly low altitude. As soon as I started to figure out what was going on, the pilot banked the plane really hard to the left pinning my weight up against the wall of the fuselage and he brought it right around and then jacked the stick back over, straightened it out and set it down. Before I could even begin to freak out, the plane was slowing down and taxiing to the gate.

[Gogar]

Originally Posted by varmint

is that a crater? looks at least 15 foot deep. didn't think a passenger plane had enough mass to cause that. maybe it's a natural ditch.

I'm betting it could make a hole that big, going a couplea hundred miles an hour.

[McLovin]

Isn't it still statistically safer than travel by goat?

[TheStig]

I think it's safer to fly something made out of Legos.

[dhoward]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TEHRAN, IRAN — A Russian-made Iranian passenger plane carrying nearly 170 people crashed shortly after takeoff Wednesday, smashing into a field northwest of the capital and shattering to pieces. State television said all on board were killed.

The plane's tail burst into flames in the air and the aircraft circled as if looking for a place to land before it crashed, an unidentified witness told the semi-official ISNA news agency.
The impact gouged a deep trench in the dirt field, which was littered with smoking wreckage and body parts, according to photos from the scene. Footage aired on state TV showed a large chunk of a wing, but much of the wreckage appeared to be in small shreds, and emergency workers and witnesses picked around the shredded metal for bodies and flight data recorders to determine the cause of the crash.

The Caspian Airlines Tupolev jet had taken off from Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport Wednesday and was headed to the Armenian capital Yerevan. It crashed about 16 minutes after takeoff near the village of Jannat Abad outside the city of Qazvin, around 75 miles northwest of Tehran, civil aviation spokesman Reza Jaafarzadeh told state media.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known, but Iran has frequent crashes that are blamed on poor maintenance of its aging fleet. Hossein Ayaznia, an aviation police official, said emergency workers were searching for the plane's black box.
The deputy chairman of Armenia's civil aviation authority Arsen Pogosian told reporters in Yerevan there were 154 passengers and 15 crewmembers on board the TU-154M. Earlier, Jaafarzadeh had put the number at 153 passengers and 15 crew, and the reason for the discrepancy was not immediately known.

Six Armenian citizens and two Georgian citizens were on the flight, and the rest were likely Iranians, Pogosian said.
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.
Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Bahzadpour told the IRNA news agency that The plane was completely destroyed in the crash and shattered to pieces, Qazvin emergency services director Hossein Behzadpour told the state news agency IRNA.
"The force of the crash was so serious that pieces of the aircraft were thrown over a 200 meter area. Unfortunately, all the bodies were totally destroyed," Behzadpour said.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad issued a statement expressing condolences for the deaths and urging a swift investigation of the cause.
Also among the passengers were eight members of Iran's national youth judo team, along with two trainers and a delegation chief, who were scheduled to train with the Armenian judo team before attending competitions in Hungary on Aug. 6, state TV said.
Tehran blames the maintenance woes of its airlines in part on U.S. sanctions that prevent Iran from getting spare parts for some planes. However, Caspian Airlines — an Iranian-Russian joint venture founded in 1993 — uses Russian-made Tupolevs whose maintenance would be less impaired by American sanctions.
In February 2006, a Russian-made TU-154 operated by Iran Airtour, which is affiliated with Iran's national carrier, crashed during landing in Tehran, killing 29 of the 148 people on board. Another Airtour Tupolev crashed in 2002 in the mountains of western Iran, killing all 199 on board.
The crashes have also affected Iran's military. In December 2005, 115 people were killed when a U.S.-made C-130 plane, crashed into a 10-story building near Tehran's Mehrabad airport. In Nov. 2007, a Russian-made Iranian military plane crashed shortly after takeoff killing 36 members of the elite Revolutionary Guards.

Before crashing, the plane's tail was on fire as it circled in the air, one witness told The Associated Press.
"Then, I saw the plane crashing nose-down. It hit the ground causing a big explosion. The impact shook the ground like an earthquake. Then, plane pieces were scattered all over the agricultural fields," Ali Akbar Hashemi, a 23-year-old who was laying gas pipes in a nearby home, told AP by phone.
The impact blasted a deep trench in the dirt field, which was littered with smoking wreckage, body parts and personal items from the Tupolev jet, according to photos from the scene. Firefighters put out the flaming wreckage, which officials said was strewn over a 200 yard (meter) area. A large chunk of a wing was visible in footage of the scene, but much of the wreckage appeared to be in small shreds.

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by varmint

is that a crater? looks at least 15 foot deep. didn't think a passenger plane had enough mass to cause that. maybe it's a natural ditch.

Take 80 tons up to 525 mph and run it into the ground and see what kinda hole it makes.

Some of them Tupolevs can have up to a 115 ton weight at take off.

They've been around since the 1960's, if they were inherently unsafe we'd have known about it long ago.
They may be wore out, there may be planes out there that are safer, but the basic design of these planes is not flawed.

[tcar]

Originally Posted by RWebb

It was a Russian Tupolev that is not considered airworthy for W. Europe.

It's not welcome in W. Europe because of NOISE restrictions, not airworthiness. This newer version has fans, though.

Those planes have been around forever, they don't have a bad safety record, only a few hull losses w/ fatalities due to mech problems since the early 70's.

They are still being manufactured, or at least were earlier this year.