December 21, 2018
An aviation official has announced that the production line of the AN-140 aircraft that Iran was assembling has not been re-opened and is unlikely ever to be re-opened.
Use of the aircraft was halted in 2014 by President Rohani when an AN-140, called the IrAN-140 in Iran, crashed in the middle of a Tehran boulevard just shortly after taking off from Mehrabad Airport.
There were mixed reports after that about whether production would continue.
In an interview with the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) December 3, the secretary of the Association of Iranian Airlines, Maqsud Asadi-Samani, said the plane’s production was finished.
“Due to its record of accidents and crashes, the project has been stopped,” he said.
The plane of was designed by Antonov of Ukraine; the AN in the name is for Antonov. The company signed a contract with Iran in the 1990s to start a production line near Esfahan in the plant that had been built before the revolution for the production of Bell Helicopters. The IrAN-140s would first be assembled from kits sent from Ukraine with Iranian-made parts being added later. The plant was to produce 80 planes.
Start-up was very slow and Iran was never able to reach the planned rate of one plane per month. In the end, it is believed that only 16 planes were assembled and put in the air in 16 years before the crash that brought production to an end. Altogether, three of the 16 IrAN-140s are known to have crashed. All involved engine failures.
On August 10, 2014, the engine of an IrAN-140 sputtered to a halt as a commercial flight was taking off from Mehrabad and the plane came down in the middle of the capital; 39 of the 48 passengers and crew on board were killed. No one on the ground was killed.
President Rohani immediately suspended all IrAN-140 flights. But Defense Minister Hossain Dehqan defended the aircraft, saying it had met all international standards. (The Iranian military was to get 20 of the planes.)
In May 2015, Mohammad-Ali Sirati, the managing director of HESA, the company that assembled the aircraft, said the company was still manufacturing the plane.
Within days, Hamid Habibi of the Iran Civil Aviation Organization said production of the plane had been suspended. He said HESA had no authority to make the plane “for the time being.”
Until now, no one has said the suspension had been turned into a cancelation of production.
HESA had been negotiating at one time with Antonov and with various Russian firms to assemble other passenger planes. The plant is still in use. It is where Iran’s Saeqeh and Kowsar combat fighter jets, drones and various helicopters are made.
The obvious difficulty the government has had turning out even a handful of low-tech turboprop aircraft raises obvious questions about its claims to be mass-producing jet fighters.
A Doctor Vaziri, identified as the head of IrAN-140 production, told Esfahan television in October 2006 that Iran was spending $14 million to produce each IrAN-140. The version of the An-140 made in Ukraine carried a list price of $6.7 million at that time.
In 2007, other officials acknowledged losing $120 million altogether trying to assemble the 52-seat airplane.
Iranian airlines had so little interest in buying the plane that HESA created its won airline, Sepahan, to use the aircraft. It was a Sepahan plane to that fell in Tehran’s Mina Boulevard in 2014.
