April 19, 2019
Two Iranian Fokker 100 passenger planes have suffered problems in the same week with their landing gear, with one of the planes forced to make a belly-landing when it couldn’t get its wheels to come down.
The first Fokker to have trouble was an Iran Air plane flying from Qeshm Island to Tehran March 19. It circled the airport repeatedly as it tried to get its main wheels down. They would not deploy, and the plane landed with only its nose wheel deployed.
Tehran media reported that the plane caught fire on landing. A video showed much sparking as the plane slid down the runway, but no flames. A report by The Aviation Herald, a website about aviation, said there was no fire.
But The Aviation Herald, unlike the Iran media, reported that this was the third time in three days that the plane had had trouble with its main landing gear. In both those previous cases, the crew was eventually able to get the landing gear down before landing.
Three days later, on March 22, another Fokker 100, this one owned by Aseman Airlines and flying from Mehrabad to Ilam, had the same problem. The crew turned around and flew back to Tehran, trying to get the landing gear to deploy hydraulically or manually. On the approach to Tehran, according to The Aviation Herald, the landing gear finally deployed properly and the aircraft landed without further incident.
The Aviation Herald reported that on the five flights prior to this, the crew found the landing gear was slow to deploy each time. The Herald reported that when the aircraft was checked after the last incident, two O-rings in the hydraulic system were found to be contaminated.
The belly-landing at Mehrabad was at least the second time in a decade that a pilot of a passenger plane was unable to get the wheels to deploy and had to make a belly-flop landing amid a mass of sparks.
In 2011, pilot Hushang Shahbazi became a national hero when he landed a larger plane with the wheels up and no injuries. Not as much publicity was given to this latest incident and the pilot was not even named.
State broadcasting quoted Reza Jafarzadeh, the head of public relations at Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization, as saying the belly-flop plane had 24 passengers and nine crew. But Pir-Hossain Kolivand, head of the emergency services agency, told state television there were 100 passengers aboard. There was no explanation for the discrepancy in the figures. The Aviation Herald reported Jafarzadeh’s figures.
Iranian aircraft have suffered a lot of accidents, and the official response is normally to blame US sanctions. However, it is clear that Iran is able to buy spare parts on the black market or it could not still be flying planes 40 years after the revolution. Furthermore, the embargo on selling plane parts to Iran was lifted for a year and a half by the nuclear deal. Yet, in that entire time, Iran bought only a solitary part from Boeing, further proof that Iran was having no problem getting parts elsewhere.
The latest problem, as indicated by the contamination of the O-rings, appears to be poor maintenance. Further evidence of that is the large numbers of planes that have suffered an engine failure shortly after take-off from Mehrabad Airport and have had to return to the airfield. There have been no such incidents reported the past few years, suggesting the maintenance system at Mehrabad has been beefed up.
Fokker was the world’s largest aircraft manufacturer in the late 1920s. It was founded by Dutchman Anthony Fokker in 1912 and based in Germany, where it made many of the most famous fighter planes of World War I, including the Red Baron’s plane. After the war, in 1919, Fokker moved his company to the Netherlands. The Fokker 100 was its last major aircraft. The firm fell on hard times in competition with Boeing and Airbus and went out of business in 1996.
Twenty-one Fokker 100s remain in commission in Iran with Iran Air, Aseman, Kish, Qeshm and Karun Airlines