Aseman Airlines announced that one of its passenger planes crashed in the mountains of Zagros, Iran, killing all 66 people on board.
An Aseman Airlines ATR-72 aircraft. (Image: Plane Spotters.)
“The plane crashed in the Semirom area. The entire emergency team is on alert ,” Pir Hossein Koolivand, head of Iran’s emergency services, told Fars News.
The crashed plane, believed to be an Aseman Airlines ATR-72, disappeared from radar this morning while flying from Tehran to Yasuj. The place where the plane crashed is about 80 km north of Yasuj, the provincial capital of Kohgiluyeh, and Boyer-Ahmad, southwestern Iran.
Aladin Borujerdi, head of Iran’s parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, said the plane was carrying 66 people, including 60 passengers and six crew members.
Iranian state television IRIB quoted an announcement from Mohammad Tabatabai, a spokesman for Aseman Airlines, saying that all passengers and crew members were killed.
Iran deployed a helicopter to the scene, because the terrain was not suitable for the ambulance to operate. The search and rescue operation is being hampered by bad weather, according to Tasnim.
The ATR-72 has been in service since the late 1980s, but the aircraft is relatively new to Iranian airlines. Iran in 2016 signed a contract to buy 20 ATR-72 aircraft, considered possible to buy 20 more, and received the first shipment in 2017.
According to Plane Spotters, the fleet of Aseman Airlines, a semi-private airline headquartered in Tehran, is quite old, with planes taken over between 1993 and 2009.