Rescue Teams Recover Black Boxes at Site of Iran Plane Crash

Rescue teams have recovered the black boxes of a plane that crashed last month in the mountains of southwestern Iran leaving 66 people dead, official media reported on Sunday.

"The box that recorded flight parameters and the one with conversations in the cockpit have been handed over to judicial authorities," Reza Jafarzadeh, the public relations director of Iran's civil aviation organization, told official news agency IRNA.

Jafarzadeh said the two black boxes of the Aseman Airlines ATR-72 were found on Saturday by rescue teams, who had resumed search operations in the Zagros mountains on Friday after bad weather forced them to halt efforts for nearly a week.

They were to be handed over to investigators seeking to determine the cause of the accident. The aircraft, on a domestic flight out of Tehran, went down in a snowstorm on February 18 and crashed at a height of about 4,000 metres (13,000 feet).

There have been no reported survivors from the plane's 66 passengers and crew. The crash site has been hit by heavy snowfall in recent days, making rescue operations particularly dangerous due to avalanche risks, according to officials quoted by local media.

So far, only body parts have been recovered from the scene of the crash. Forensic teams have performed tests on 51 samples of human tissue in attempts to identify the victims, IRNA reported.

Photo Credit: Tasnim

Iran Teams Carry Plane Crash Dead Down From Mountain

Emergency teams on Wednesday began recovering bodies from a plane crash in Iran's Zagros mountains but the operation had to be suspended due to bad weather, officials said.

Aseman Airlines flight EP3704, carrying 66 people, disappeared from radar on Sunday morning around 45 minutes after taking off from Tehran on a domestic flight. No survivors have been found.

Search helicopters located the crash site after a break in the weather on Tuesday at a height of around 4,000 metres (13,000 feet) in the Dena range.

Helicopters were unable to land but officials said a recovery operation had begun on Wednesday, with emergency personnel carrying bodies on their backs to a road at the foot of the mountain.

The Iranian Red Crescent later said the operation had to be suspended as the bad weather returned, news agency ISNA reported.

It was unclear how many bodies had been recovered. One official reported seven bodies recovered but the Red Crescent said 32 "packages" had been brought down from the mountain and that these were not necessarily entire bodies.

A local rescue official told news agency ILNA that it should be possible to identify most of the remains.

The crash of the ATR-72 twin-engine plane, which had been in service since 1993, reawakened concerns over aviation safety in Iran, which has been exacerbated by international sanctions over the years.

Aseman Airlines was blacklisted by the European Commission in December 2016. It was one of only three airlines barred over safety concerns -- the other 190 being blacklisted due to broader concerns over oversight in their
respective countries.

By Eric Randolph in Tehran

Photo Credit: Morteza Salehi

Hazardous Effort to Recover Bodies From Plane Crash in Iran Mountains

Iranian rescue teams struggled to recover bodies on Tuesday from the wreckage of a plane that crashed in hazardous terrain near a mountain peak two days earlier with 66 people on board.

"Deep and dangerous crevices in the area of the crash have made it impossible for helicopters to land," Ghafoor Rastinrooz, director of the regional medical centre, told official news agency IRNA. "The bodies must be transferred by hand to the foot of the mountain which will be time-consuming," he said.

Aseman Airlines flight EP3704 disappeared from radar as it flew over the Zagros mountain range on Sunday morning, around 45 minutes after taking off from Tehran on a domestic flight.

After two days of heavy snow and fog, the weather finally cleared on Tuesday morning, allowing a helicopter crew to spot a piece of the wreckage with the company's logo.

A pilot told state broadcaster IRIB he had seen "scattered bodies around the plane" and that it was located on one of the Dena mountains at a height of around 4,000 metres (13,000 feet).

Footage from the helicopter showed a glimpse of the wreckage in deep snow on a sheer mountain face, while officials warned that bad weather was due to return in a few hours.

Around 100 mountaineers have been making their way up the mountain since Monday and teams were being choppered to near the crash site. "Helicopters are dropping off the rescue and relief teams in the nearest spot possible, as accessing the site of the crash is very difficult," Ali Abedzadeh, head of the Civil Aviation Organisation, told state TV.

"Only highly professional and trained mountaineers can go there, get close to the plane and bring back the bodies," he said.

Aviation Safety

The ATR-72 twin-engine plane, in service since 1993, flew early Sunday from the capital's Mehrabad airport towards the city of Yasuj, some 500 kilometres (300 miles) to the south.

A team of crash investigators from French air safety agency BEA was due to arrive in Iran later on Tuesday. The incident has reawakened concerns over aviation safety in Iran, which has been exacerbated by international sanctions over the years.

Aseman Airlines was blacklisted by the European Commission in December 2016. It was one of only three airlines barred over safety concerns -- the other 190 being blacklisted due to broader concerns over oversight in their respective countries.

Iran has complained that sanctions imposed by the United States have jeopardised the safety of its airlines and made it difficult to maintain and modernise ageing fleets.

Aseman was forced to ground many of its planes at the height of the sanctions due to difficulties in obtaining spares. In a working paper presented to the United Nations' International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) in 2013, Iran said US sanctions were blocking "the acquisition of parts, services and support essential to aviation safety".

Iran has suffered multiple aviation disasters, most recently in 2014 when 39 people were killed as a Sepahan Airlines plane crashed just after take-off from Tehran, narrowly avoiding many more deaths when it plummeted near a busy market.

But figures from the Flight Safety Foundation, a US-based NGO, suggest Iran is nonetheless above-average in implementing ICAO safety standards.

Lifting sanctions on aviation purchases was a key clause in the nuclear deal that Iran signed with world powers in 2015. Following the deal, Aseman Airlines finalised an agreement to buy 30 Boeing 737 MAX jets for $3 billion (2.4 billion euros) last June, with an option to buy 30 more.

The sale could still be scuppered if US President Donald Trump chooses to reimpose sanctions in the coming months, as he has threatened to do.

By Eric Randolph in Tehran

Photo Credit: Ali Khodaei