No Injuries as Plane Crash-Lands in Mahshahr

Date: 27 January 2020 - 21:59

News ID: ۷۵۶۰۸

TEHRAN (Dispatches) -- An Iranian passenger airliner carrying 144 people crash-landed on a runway and skidded onto a major highway next to an airport Monday, the latest crash as U.S. sanctions bar Iran from parts or new aircraft.
Authorities said two people suffered injuries in the hard landing of the McDonnell Douglas MD-83 flown by Caspian Airlines in Mahshahr, a city in Iran’s oil-rich southwestern Khuzestan province.
Passengers, apparently in shock, calmly exited the aircraft with their carry-on baggage out of a door near the cockpit and another over the plane’s wing, video from Iran’s Civil Aviation Network News showed. A flight attendant shouted at passengers to calmly walk away as another crew member joined her on the wing.
"We crashed. We crashed but we are unhurt,” a male passenger said in Farsi in the video. "My hand is shaking.”
Provincial airport director Muhammad Reza Rezanian said all of the passengers had been safely taken off the plane, which had been flying a route from the Iranian capital, Tehran, some 610 kilometers northeast of Mahshahr. The plane carried 136 passengers and eight crew members, authorities said.
Images from the scene showed the plane had ground to a halt not far from a populated area. The plane also missed traffic on a major highway linking Mahshahr to Imam Khomeini Port.
National television said the plane involved in Monday’s crash-landing came in harder than usual and lost its landing gear as it hit the tarmac.
The McDonnell Douglas MD-83, a single-aisle workhorse introduced in the mid-1980s, largely has been phased out of commercial air travel in the West. American Airlines retired the last of its MD-80 fleet in September.
The plane involved in Monday’s crash-landing in Iran, registered as EP-CPZ, was more than 25 years old. It had flown for airlines in France, Canada, the U.S., Colombia, Burkina Faso and Ukraine before being registered to Caspian Airlines in August 2012.
Maintenance information regarding the American-built MD-83 that crashed Monday was not immediately available. However, Iran has struggled to obtain parts for its aging fleet of airliners amid sanctions by the U.S.
Under its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, Iran could purchase new aircraft and had lined up tens of billions of dollars in deals with Airbus and Boeing Co., which owns McDonnell Douglas. However, the manufacturers backed away under increasing pressure by President Donald Trump, who ultimately withdrew the U.S. from the nuclear deal in May 2018 and increased tensions with Tehran.
The U.S. Treasury in 2014 separately sanctioned Caspian Airlines.