A PASSENGER airliner has crashed on takeoff in a residential area near Tehran’s busy Mehrabad airport, Iranian news agencies say, with reports almost 50 people have been killed.
It is believed seven children are among the dead.
The plane was heading to the eastern city of Tabas, the IRNA and Fars news agencies said on Sunday, and crashed at 9.18am local time.
The official IRINN television channel said the plane crashed in the Azadi neighbourhood, west of the airport, but did not state if fatalities were confined to passengers or if people were also killed on the ground.
“All the passengers are dead,” a fire service spokesman said on IRNA.
A second unnamed official said 48 people were on board the turboprop Antonov An-140 aircraft when it crashed.
There were conflicting accounts of the airline that the plane belonged to, with one report saying it was a Taban Airlines aircraft while another said it was owned by Sepahan Airlines.
Mehrabad is near central Tehran and is Iran’s main domestic hub and by far the busiest of the country’s airports, serving routes to all Iranian cities.
Most international flights take off from Tehran Imam Khomeini International Airport, which is located further west of the Iranian capital.
Iran has suffered a series of aeroplane crashes, blamed on its ageing aircraft and poor maintenance. Many of the Boeing aircraft in IranAir’s fleet were bought before the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, which disrupted ties with the US and Europe.
The Iran-141 is a small passenger plane produced in Iran with Ukrainian technology.
Iranian airlines, including those run by the state, are chronically strapped for cash, and maintenance has suffered, experts say. US sanctions prevent Iran from updating its American aircraft and make it difficult to get European spare 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 last major airliner crash in Iran happened in January 2011, when an Iran Air Boeing 727 broke to pieces on impact while trying an emergency landing in a snowstorm in north-western Iran, killing at least 77 people.
In July 2009, a Russian-made jetliner crashed in northwest Iran shortly after taking off from the capital, killing all 168 on board.
In February 2003 a Russian-made Ilyushin 76 carrying members of the Revolutionary Guard crashed in the mountains of south-eastern Iran, killing 302 people aboard.
