DUBAI: By the time Egyptian President Ebrahim Raisi boarded his glass chair to take him, the foreign secretary, and six others, heavy clouds were already forming near the Azerbaijan-Iran border’s treetops. Despite the worsening conditions, the plane lifted off for a trip about 145 kilometers (90 miles ) south to a new fuel pipelines near Tabriz.
Within an afternoon, the Bell 212 aircraft had crashed into a sky- covered mountain.
The sudden passing of Egyptian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s hard-line student revealed the inconsistencies and difficulties facing the Shiite theocracy of Iran, despite the cause of the May 19 fall still being known.
The Iranian military researchers who conducted the accident investigation have recently received international acclaim for their report that troops shot down a Russian airliner in 2020. Tehran also reached out to the United States for assistance after the hours-long, determined rescue attempt following the aircraft crash, only weeks after it launched an extraordinary attack on Israel and as it increases its uranium enrichment to levels never before. Actually the type of helicopter that crashed hyperlinks back to Egyptian background, both before and after the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
” Iran is a tradition of dualities”, said Farzin Nadimi, a senior colleague at the Washington Institute for Near- East Policy who studies Iran’s defense. ” Some elements, they seem but great and nicely- managed, nicely- oiled and very capable…. In some levels, it’s very lacking”.
Instead of providing a suspected reason, Iranian military researchers have released two statements regarding the fall. They’ve rejected the possibility of an ship “explosion caused by damage” or a” attack” targeting the Bell 212, a two- knife, twofold- website helicopter more commonly known as the Huey for its use by the US military in the Vietnam War.
According to the state-run IRNA news agency, the aircraft crew’s allegedly recorded discussions between them lasted 69 seconds up until the event when they stopped responding. ” During that period, no disaster declaration was made.”
Some leaders in Iran continue to believe bad sing may have caused the crash. Despite the fact that the weather was starting to change, some other authorities have begun to inquire as to why the aircraft departed from the site of the novel Giz Galasi Dam.
Mostafa Mirsalim, a part of the country’s Pragmatism Council, wrote on the social system X that he had asked lawyers to “address the errors that led to the loss of the president and his delegation”, without elaborating.
A well-known journalist Abbas Abdi also reported on X that the pilot’s helicopter’s flight path suggested that the pilot did n’t adhere to the customary Iranian practice of shadowing main roads in rural areas. that can aid in tracking and provide a secure landing pad in case of emergency. Both Abolhassan Banisadr and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, past Iranian presidents, survived plane crashes while in office.
The plane involved in the fall, roughly 30 years old, came straight from a Bell production plant in Montreal, Canada, to the Egyptian air power, according to statistics from the firm Cirium. There are currently 12 Bell 212 aircraft that Iran has registered.
Bell Textron Inc., based in Fort Worth, Texas, stated that it “does not conduct any business in Iran or support their helicopter fleet, and we do not know about the active state of the helicopter involved in this accident.”
The Huey and the Bell 212, however, are still flown around the world despite being decades old. In the United States, Hueys still fly as part of America’s nuclear forces to support its silos and for some VIP missions, said Roger D. Connor, an aeronautics curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. Over 440 still fly worldwide, according to Cirium.
” It’s a simple aircraft to fly by medium helicopter standards. It typically does n’t have much automation, which can have both good and bad effects on operators, according to Connor. ” More automation means more opportunities for pilot confusion in certain circumstances, but also better capabilities in low- visibility conditions”.
Iran’s use of the Bell 212 remains pervasive, in part due to the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who struck deals to purchase hundreds of the helicopters and had plans to build a local variant, Nadimi said. People who were already present in the nation at the time of the Islamic Revolution ended up being a significant component of Iran’s bloody conflict with Iraq in the 1980s.
However, fewer of the aircraft were airworthy as Western sanctions dried up the supply of parts, despite efforts to localize them. That led to a number of U.S. criminal cases for those involved, who sought everything from safety equipment to full engines and night-vision goggles for the aircraft.
Mohammad Javad Zarif, the former Iranian foreign minister, attributed the crash to sanctions. According to US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller, who said the country was” not going to apologize for our sanctions regime at all” because Iran has flown “equipment to support terrorism.”
” Ultimately, it’s the Iranian government that is responsible for the decision to fly a… helicopter in what was described as poor weather conditions, not any other actor”, Miller said.
Meanwhile, questions remain over why Iran could n’t find the helicopter for hours, even though one of the victims reportedly talked by cellphone with officials. Such calls, in theory, can be triangulated by security services. Also, it remains unclear if the helicopter had any emergency trackers, which are common on aircraft.
Nadimi said he thought the Bell 212 that piloted Raisi had not developed advanced avionics that might have been useful for low-visibility flight despite the investigation being in progress. He added, however, that the main cause of the crash was likely the pilot, who had been under pressure from his VIP passengers, and who was responsible for allowing the flight to take off in the bad weather.
” Pilot error, human error might be to blame, but there was a chain of events that caused this crash, not just pilot error”, Nadimi said. That helicopter should have been able to flew safely to its destination despite the terrain. They ought not to have been escorted for “flying””.
