Boeing 737 Plane Crash in Iran Prompts Conflicting Statements - The New York Times - 0 views
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A Ukrainian airliner carrying at least 176 people crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran on Wednesday, killing everyone on board. It was unclear what caused the disaster, but the aircraft, a Boeing 737-800, went down amid an escalating, violent conflict between the United States and Iran.
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Though the evidence remained sketchy, aviation experts said that what was known indicated that the plane could have been attacked.
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Experts say that is an extremely rare sequence of events, even in a catastrophic accident — and all the more unexpected in a relatively new plane, built in 2016, of a model with a very good safety record.
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“Planes just don’t blow up in mid air,” said Richard Aboulafia, vice president for analysis at Teal Group, an aviation consulting firm. “It doesn’t work like that.”
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Iranian news organizations tied to the government referred to technical problems with the plane, but they did not elaborate or cite evidence.
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An airliner should be able to fly even if one engine fails. An “uncontained” engine failure, in which parts of the engine disintegrate, can spray shrapnel that damages and even destroys the plane, but such events are rare.
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After the crash, Ukraine’s embassy in Iran initially issued a statement ruling out terrorism or a rocket attack as a cause of the crash. But the statement was later removed from the embassy’s website and replaced by one saying it was too early to draw any conclusions.
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After an accident, the “black boxes” are often sent to the plane’s maker for analysis, but Iran would not send the flight data recorders to Boeing, an American company, Mr. Abedzadeh said in an interview with Mehr. “We will not give the black box to the manufacturer and the Americans,” Mehr quoted him as saying.
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President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said he had ordered the prosecutor general to open a criminal investigation into the crash and that the country’s entire civil aviation fleet would be checked.
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On Tuesday, the Federal Aviation Administration barred American airliners from flying over Iran, citing a risk that commercial planes would be mistaken for military aircraft. Several non-American carriers rerouted flights on Wednesday to avoid Iraq and Iran, according to Flightradar24.
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The airline said it was canceling flights to Tehran indefinitely and promised a full investigation into the causes of the crash, involving officials from Ukraine, Iran and Boeing.
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The airline began in the 1990s as newly independent Ukraine’s state flag carrier but was subsequently privatized. Its website calls the business a “public private entity.”