Scores killed in Iran plane crash

All 168 passengers and crew have died in a Caspian Airlines plane crash in northern Iran, officials say.

Wreckage was spread over a large area in a field in Jannatabad village, Qazvin province, about 75 miles (120km) north-west of Tehran, state TV said.

The Tupolev plane was flying from the Iranian capital to Yerevan in Armenia, with mostly Iranian passengers.

The cause of the crash, which happened soon after take-off, was unknown. One witness said it plummeted from the sky.

“The 7908 Caspian flight crashed 16 minutes after its take-off from the International Imam Khomeini Airport,” Iranian Aviation Organisation spokesman Reza Jafarzadeh said, reported Iran’s Press TV.

He said no problems were reported before take-off and there would be a full investigation into the cause of the crash.

At Yerevan’s airport, one woman wept as she said her sister and two nephews, aged six and 11, had been on the flight.

“What will I do without them?” said Tina Karapetian, 45, before collapsing.

It was earlier reported that most of the passengers were Armenian, but officials later said the majority on board were Iranian.

A Caspian Airlines spokesman told Reuters news agency up to 25 of the passengers were Armenians.

There were also two Georgians on the plane, which had 153 passengers and 15 crew.

‘Big explosion’

One witness said the Tu-154 circled briefly looking for an emergency landing site, while another said the plane’s tail was on fire.

A man who saw the crash said the aircraft exploded on impact.

ANALYSIS Jon Leyne,Courtesy BBC News Iran has a notoriously bad air safety record. Because of sanctions imposed by the United States, Iran relies on an increasingly ageing fleet of airliners, and has trouble buying spares. There are tales of aircrew buying spare parts on flights to Europe, then sneaking them back to Iran in the cockpit. While those sanctions don’t apply to aircraft from Russia and Ukraine, many planes from those countries in the Iranian fleet also appear well past their best. For some people, flying in Iran can be a nerve-wracking experience. Stepping on board, it often becomes quickly apparent you are in a plane that has done many years service. There are also frequent delays because of the shortage of aircraft. Iranian engineers and aircrew do their best to keep their fleets in service.

“I saw the plane crashing nose-down. It hit the ground causing a big explosion. The impact shook the ground like an earthquake. Then, plane pieces were scattered all over the fields,” 23-year-old Ali Akbar Hashemi told AP news agency.

Eight members of Iran’s national junior judo team and two coaches were on the flight, heading for training with the Armenian team.

Mohammad Reza Montazer Khorasan, the head of the disaster management centre at Iran’s health ministry, said: “All people aboard… the crashed plane are dead,” according to AFP news agency.

Television footage showed a massive crater in a field, with smouldering debris over a wide area.

The Qazvin Fire Department Chief said: “The area of the disaster is very wide and wreckage of the crashed plane has been thrown around as far as 150 to 200m.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered his condolences to the families of the victims.

IRANIAN PLANE CRASHES Feb 2006: Tupolev crashes in Tehran, kills 29 people Dec 2005: C-130 military transport plane crashes near Tehran, kills 110 Feb 2003: Iranian military transport plane crashes in south of country, kills all 276 on board Dec 2002: Antonov 140 commuter plane crashes in central Iran, kills all 46 people on board Feb 2002: Tupolev crashes in west Iran, kills all 199 on board

The plane was built in Russia in 1987.

It was the third deadly crash of a Tupolev Tu-154 in Iran since 2002.

The BBC’s Jon Leyne says Iran’s civil and military air fleets are made up of elderly aircraft, in poor condition due to their age and lack of maintenance.

Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, trade embargoes by Western nations have forced Iran to buy mainly Russian-built planes to supplement an existing fleet of Boeings and other American and European models.

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Scores die in Russian plane crash

A Russian airliner that crashed near a city in the Urals, killing all 88 people on board, caught fire and exploded in mid-air, reports say.

The Boeing-737-500, belonging to a branch of the national airline Aeroflot, was on a flight from Moscow to Perm, near the Ural mountains.

Twenty-one foreign passengers were on board the Aeroflot Nord flight.

Radio contact with the plane was lost as it was landing. One witness said it looked like a comet as it came down.

“It looked like a… burning comet. It hit the ground opposite the next house, there was a blaze, like fireworks, it lit the whole sky, the blaze,” the witness told Russian TV.

One witness said the blaze lit up the whole sky

The Boeing-737 had 82 passengers on board, including seven children, and six crew, Aeroflot said.

Those killed include Gen Gennady Troshev, a former commander of Russian forces in Chechnya and military adviser to former Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A spokesman for Russian federal prosecutors, Vladimir Markin, said a criminal inquiry had been launched to examine whether safety procedures had been violated.

Earlier, Mr Markin said the most likely cause of the crash was technical failure but Aeroflot says the plane had “a full technical inspection” early this year and was judged to be in a “proper condition”.

Aeroflot conducted its own investigation into the causes of the crash and, without giving details, announced it was stripping Aeroflot Nord of the right to use its name from Monday onwards.

‘Completely destroyed’

Contact with the plane was lost at 0521 Perm time on Sunday (2321 GMT Saturday) as the plane was coming in for landing at a height of 1,100 metres, Aeroflot said.

The minister for security in the region said the plane had caught fire in the air at an altitude of 1,000 meters.

It crashed on the outskirts of Perm, just a few hundred meters from residential buildings, but no one was hurt on the ground.

Part of the Trans-Siberian railway was shut down as a result of damage to the main east-west train track and the blaze took two hours to extinguish.

The 21 foreigners killed were listed as nine people from Azerbaijan, five from Ukraine and one person each from France, Switzerland, Latvia, the United States, Germany, Turkey and Italy, Aeroflot said.

Investigators have recovered two black box recorders from the crash site. There was no immediate suggestion of an attack or sabotage.

Aeroflot’s managing director, Valery Okulov, told reporters in Moscow that his company had already conducted its own, private investigation into the crash and decided to sever ties with Aeroflot Nord.

“We have paid too high a price for lending out our flag,” he added.

Scorched earth

Correspondents say the tragedy will be a setback for Russian aviation, which has been trying to shake off a chequered safety record.

A woman in Perm told Vesti-24 TV how she was thrown out of bed by the force of the blast when the plane crashed.

She said: “My daughter ran in from the next room crying: ‘What happened? Has a war begun or what?’

“My neighbors, other witnesses, told me that it was burning in the air.”

Sunday’s accident was the deadliest involving a Russian airliner since 170 people died in August 2006 when a Tupolev-154 bound for St Petersburg crashed in Ukraine.

US Boeing workers set to strike

The union says its members have gone without a pay rise for four years

Production at the world’s biggest aircraft manufacturer, Boeing, is to stop in the US after 27,000 workers at the company called a strike over pay.

Members of the Machinists Union, mainly based in Seattle, will down tools after last minute negotiations failed.

Boeing says it has offered more than $34,000 (£17,000) per employee in pay and benefits.

Analysts say the stoppage cause further delays in the delivery of the new Dreamliner aircraft.

The union says with that with Boeing’s record profits and its members going without a pay rise for the last four years, the offer is not good enough.

Dreamliner delays

The Machinists Union is Boeing’s biggest labour group, and the company has said it will not try to assemble aircraft during the strike.

Analysts say that the stoppage could cost Boeing at least $100m each day in lost revenues, as well as delays in the delivery of the Dreamliner aircraft.

Boeing hopes that its latest lightweight passenger jet – which is already two years late – will help it compete with rival manufacturer, Airbus.

Most of the striking workers are based around Seattle in Washington State.

Boeing is so important to the local economy that the state governor has repeatedly called on both sides to find a solution to the dispute.

Solar plane makes record flight

A UK-built solar-powered plane has set an unofficial world endurance record for a flight by an unmanned aircraft.

The Zephyr-6, as it is known, stayed aloft for more than three days,
running through the night on batteries it had recharged in sunlight.

The flight was a demonstration for the US military, which is
looking for new types of technology to support its troops on the
ground.

Craft like Zephyr might make ideal platforms for reconnaissance.

They could also be used to relay battlefield communications.

Chris Kelleher, from UK defence and research firm QinetiQ, said
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer advantages over traditional
aircraft and even satellites.

“The principal advantage is persistence – that you would be
there all the time,” he told BBC News. “A satellite goes over the same
part of the Earth twice a day – and one of those is at night – so it’s
only really getting a snapshot of activity. Zephyr would be watching
all day.”

Deployment close

The latest flight was conducted at the US Army’s Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.

The Zephyr flew non-stop for 82 hours, 37 minutes.

That time beats the current official world record for unmanned
flight set by the US robot plane Global Hawk – of 30 hours, 24 minutes
– and even Zephyr’s own previous best of 54 hours achieved last year.

However, the Yuma mark remains “unofficial” because QinetiQ did
not involve the FAI (Federation Aeronautique Internationale), the world
air sports federation, which sanctions all record attempts.

The US Department of Defense funded the demonstration flight
under its Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD) programme.

This programme is designed to advance the technologies American commanders would most like to see in the field.

“We think Zephyr is very close to an operational system – within
the next two years is what we’re aiming for,” Mr Kelleher said. “We
have one more step of improvements; we trying to design a robust and
reliable system that will really sit up there for months; and we want
to push the performance.”

Energy density

The trial, which took place between 28 and 31 July, also included the participation of the UK Ministry of Defence.

The 30kg Zephyr was guided by remote control to an operating
altitude in excess of 18km (60,000ft), and then flown on autopilot and
via satellite communication.

It tested a communications payload weighing approximately 2kg.

Zephyr should be in commanders’ hands within two years

At first sight, the propeller-driven Zephyr looks to be just another
model aircraft, and it is even launched by hand. But this “pilotless”
vehicle with its 18-metre wingspan incorporates world-leading
technologies.

Its structure uses ultra-lightweight carbon-fibre material; and
the plane flies on solar power generated by amorphous silicon solar
arrays no thicker than sheets of paper. These are glued over the
aircraft’s wings.

To get through the night, the propellers are powered from lithium-sulphur batteries which are topped up during the day.

“A lot of effort has gone into power storage and light-weighting
the systems,” explained Mr Kelleher. “Lithium sulphur is more than
double the energy density of the best alternative technology which is
lithium polymer batteries.

“They are an exceptional performer. We’ve worked with the Sion
Corporation. They’ve had them in development for years. We’re actually
the first application in the world for them.”

Vulture venture

Zephyr has demonstrated that it can cope with extremes of
temperature – from the blistering 45C heat found at ground level in
Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, to the minus 70C chill experienced at
altitudes of more than 18km (60,000ft).

The engineers from the Farnborough-based company are now
collaborating with the American aerospace giant Boeing on a defence
project codenamed Vulture.

This would see the biggest plane in history take to the sky,
powered by the sun and capable of carrying a 450-kilo (1,000lb)
payload.

US commanders say the design must be able to maintain its
position over a particular spot on the Earth’s surface uninterrupted
for five years.

QinetiQ is also developing UAV technology for civilian uses.

It has been working recently with Aberystwyth University on
field monitoring trials, plotting areas of ground that may or may not
need fertiliser applications.

Lightweight plane (30-34kg/70lb) is launched by hand

Coms or surveillance payload of about 2kg (4.5lb)

Flies autonomously and can climb to more than 18km (60,000ft)

By day, Zephyr flies on solar power and recharges its batteries

Advanced amorphous silicon solar arrays supplied by Unisolar

Rechargeable lithium-sulphur batteries supplied by Sion Corp