Riding Iran’s Killer Airliners
Why the Iranians are flying museum pieces into the ground
Iran has been in the news recently. Not in a good way. A Ukranian airliner was shot down just outside Tehran with 176 people killed. An Iranian airliner skidded off a runway at a regional airport, thankfully with no serious injuries.
I’ve made six flights in and out of Tehran in my life, which is six times more than most people. I survived each time, and while I wouldn’t say the Iranian airport experience is routine, it isn’t unrecognisable to the average air traveller.
For the decades since the Iranian Revolution, the country was a place well off the regular tourist track. The government shut down relations with the Western world, and the West reciprocated. Embargoes, sanctions, war: it just wasn’t a place that was easily accessible.
For nearly forty years Iran has been unable to buy new aircraft or parts for the existing military and civil fleets. A nation that had once had the world’s fifth-largest military found its capacity downgraded, and local repairs or cannibalisation of other aircraft kept a few flying until the current day.
Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran
Almost immediately after the Revolution, in 1980 Iran’s western neighbour Iraq launched a surprise war, opening with an attack on Tehran’s Mehrabad airport, which was also its main air force base.
Tehran was the target of many air raids until the war ended in 1988, and when I arrived there a couple of years back, our local guide had stories to tell of those days.
The current situation is that some airlines — notably those from the Islamic world and regional neighbours fly modern airliners in and out of Tehran’s grand new Imam Khomeini International Airport, which is about as modern and well-planned and bland as any other recent airport.
A blast from the past
And domestic flights operate out of Mehrabad, the old airport only a short drive from the central city. I’ve flown out of there twice. On one side are the old passenger terminals, looking much as they did during the Sixties and Seventies, though now cramped with the introduction of security checkpoints.
(As an aside, Iranian security has separate streams for men and women. The men go through in the open, but we women are diverted to a covered area, where we have exactly the same process, overseen by female staff. Presumably, if a headscarf comes off, or someone gets a patdown, we don’t get trampled in a crowd of sex-crazed Persians pushed over the edge by the sight of a blonde ponytail.)
The whole precinct is a jumble of roads, admin buildings, terminals, hangars, and carparks squeezed in over the years. On Google Maps, the civilian north side of the airport shows huge airliners crammed into every possible corner. There must be a sizable percentage of the world’s remaining jumbo jets stockpiled here, parked two or three to a tennis court.
These are probably the non-flying birds, engines and electronics stripped to keep a few flying.
Not that the domestic civilian fleet is any younger. The aviation world of the Seventies lives on here, with Boeing 707s, Boeing 727s, and aging Fokkers lined up by the terminals.
I watched with some amazement as a Boeing 707, a four-engined narrowbody that Qantas stopped flying several years before I was born, taxied out and took off, black smoke pouring from its turbojets.
We were eventually put into a bus and taken on a tour through the informal aviation museum/aviation junkyard, to our plane, a Fokker that had to be at least thirty years old. The seat armrests had ashtrays in them!
Our tour leader noticed me gawping, leaned over and said, “Never mind how old it is; enjoy the legroom!”
He was right. These things had enough room that economy class passengers in the window seat could easily get out into the aisle.
The view from the window
We’d been informed on arrival that photographing people in uniform, military installations or equipment was forbidden. Much as I wanted to take a snap of some of the amazing sights, I held back.
But the place is a planespotters delight. Quite apart from the living history on the civilian side, the southern side of the airfield is the military base, a spartan, regimented area in comparison to the chaos on the other side of the runway.
There were massive transport aircraft and VIP transports, twin-rotor helicopters, hardened shelters for fighters, and even a gaggle of Russian MiGs taking off, taking taxi priority over our ancient Fokker. They were staging through Tehran on their way to Syria, I later discovered, and I could have had a huge scoop if I’d had my camera ready to hand.
We got our turn, and I noticed missile launcher positions at the corners of the airfield, easily visible once we took off. I also noticed bomb craters in surrounding fields, not something I’m used to seeing at home!
My flights within Iran have been comfortable, although the aircraft interiors are certainly showing signs of long usage. In-flight meals have been interesting: “make-your-own” sandwich rolls incorporating a piece of flatbread and fillings. Plus, of course, the usual array of sweets and sugary drinks.
I was also charmed to see “Follow Me” jeeps greeting aircraft on arrival. They led the pilots to their gates, a practice that is reminiscent of old war movies, and one I have never observed elsewhere.
The safety record
Over the past 25 years, according to Wikipedia, there have been 15 airliner crashes with 1 500 fatalities. This doesn’t seem to include the most recent crash outside Tehran, which features in a combined civil and military listing here, totalling 2 096 deaths since the Revolution.
Wikipedia also notes incidents at Mehrabad and other airports: a list of pieces falling off aircraft, landing gear collapses, unexpected fires.
One sad story; a Boeing 737 MAX on a flight from Dubai to Oslo in December 2018 landed at Shiraz airport in Iran’s south after an engine technical fault. The passengers continued their journey the next day using alternative transport, but the plane had to remain for months until spare parts could be arranged over the American embargoes. It finally returned to Norway, only to be caught in the worldwide grounding of that model.
The continuing danger
Despite American posturing, foreign tourism in Iran is a growth industry, with nearly ten million arrivals in 2019, a significant increase over previous years. Most tourists are from European and Asian countries, though Australians and New Zealanders contribute a reasonable amount.
Tourists generally arrive into the new Iman Khomeini airport at Tehran aboard a foreign carrier — I’ve flown in and out on Qatar and Emirates aircraft — but tours generally involve one or more internal flights, and these are conducted aboard aircraft that date from the 1979 Revolution and have increasingly difficult maintenance issues.
Despite Iran being a safe and welcoming country to foreign tourists, these internal flights are a danger point. Iran is a large country, and although the highways rival or surpass American Interstate standards, travelling by tourist coach between destinations is a tedious business.
Typically a tour group will fly from Tehran to (say) Shiraz, join their tourist coach and make their way back to Tehran, visiting various historical and cultural sites along the way.
And vice versa, so that the coaches and planes do not make long journeys with no paying customers aboard.
The increasing danger
Modern aircraft are marvels of design, for sure, but they are designed for limited lifespans and regular maintenance. Operating aircraft thirty years old day in and day out is not a sustainable strategy. Eventually, something breaks, and if something on an aircraft fails, it is not generally in the low-stress phases of sitting at a terminal gate or taxiing on the tarmac.
Already Iran’s airliners spend 25% of their time in maintenance — as opposed to a global standard of less than 10% — and my guess is that a lot of that time is spent waiting for new parts to be manufactured or smuggled in. And how many spare parts are still being manufactured for aircraft of the Seventies and Eighties, I ask?
While American sanctions put pressure on the Iranian regime, they have been putting pressure on since 1979 and the ayatollahs haven’t cracked yet. My guess is that they won’t.
Eventually, a plane full of Western or Chinese or Russian tourists will crash, and there will be an outcry and calls for change.
My preference — as an occasional passenger on these planes — is that change occurs before a crash, rather than after. I first visited Iran before Don Trump came to power and under the Obama administration relations were gradually improving. Since 2017 the reverse has occurred, and Don Trump’s favoured weapons of trade imposts and sanctions make life difficult for not only the Iranian people but for the increasing tourist trade.
I’m not privy to the high-level diplomacy of Don Trump’s regime, but there seems to be little reason to increase pressure on an Iran gradually making its way back into the world community. If anything, Trump’s actions are strengthening the position of Iranian hardliners.
I guess Trump couldn’t care less if a planeload of foreign tourists goes down, so long as none of them are American.
But I do.
Britni
Britni Pepper writes for Kindle Direct Publishing. She runs a blog where she reviews erotica, and rambles on about this and that. She may be reached on Twitter and Facebook.
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