It’s too early to tell the reason for the midday plane crash on 15 July in Janat-Abad near the former capital of the Persian Empire, northwest of Tehran. All 168 people on board were killed in Qazvin province and there is an inquiry underway. One thing is sure, though. It wasn’t fired on by the U.S .military which, some twenty-one years ago, shot down flight IR655, killing 290 people, including 66 children...Sanctions currently prevent U.S. citizens from doing business with Iran and there is also a total ban on selling U.S. aircraft and repair parts to Iranian aviation companies and that includes U.S.-made components in Russian aircraft such as the Caspian Airlines Tupolev TU-154M. Some five years ago, the Iranian Transport Minister, Ahmad Khorram, claimed Iran’s aviation sector was at “crisis point.” Back then, more than one hundred perished in a similar plane and three hundred then perished in an air-disaster in 2003. At the end of 2006, the head of Russian aviation company, Sukhoi, said that deals with Iran were hitting road-blocks as the U.S. Department of State complained about perceived violations of Bill Clinton’s Iran Non-Proliferation Act. That Act bars the re-exporting of U.S. made components to Iran. Sukhoi’s civil aircraft chief Viktor Subbotin said that “If the sanctions are switched fully on, everything will stop.”
