September 21, 2018
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has warned American pilots of dangers of flying over Iran, saying that several months ago an Iranian fighter jet intercepted an American passenger plane flying over Iran with permission.
The “Notice to Airmen” did not give any more details about the incident last December. Such interceptions are commonly made when the military wants to see what kind of plane is overhead, since radar can’t tell whether an aircraft is a warplane or a passenger jet.
The September 9 warning was largely a repeat of past warnings by the FAA. It said the main danger was that Iran doesn’t expend much effort “deconflicting” military activity and civilian flights—that is, it doesn’t take the trouble to find out if there are civilian planes operating in the area where its military is operating.
The notice urged American pilots “to exercise caution when operating into, out of, within or over” Iran. It did not ban Americans from flying planes over Iran.
The notice mentioned that Iran fired missiles from western Iran into Syria in June 2017 without first warning aircraft out of the area.
It said there is “heightened air defense sensitivity” in Iran, meaning that planes are at risk of being shot down by air defense missile teams that might not take precautions to make sure they aren’t shooting down commercial aircraft. This, of course, is what happened in 1988 when a US Navy ship shot down an Iran Air flight over the Persian Gulf, after it falsely judged the plane to be a military jet flying an attack route.
The September notice said the dangers came not just from Iran, noting that Russia has fired several missiles over Iran (and Iraq) at targets in Syria without notifying civilian aviation of what it was doing.
The notice also said there was a danger to flights from Iranian jammers that are operated to block global positioning satellite (GPS) data, which could blind pilots and leave them unaware of where they were flying.
In Tehran, the deputy chief of the Iranian Civil Aviation Authority, Ali-Reza Manzari, said the United States has no power to restrict or ban planes from flying over Iran, the Fars news agency reported. But the notice didn’t ban or restrict any flights; it was merely a warning to pilots—American pilots—to be wary.