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Couldn't the work an Israeli angle in there too?

edit David Janes 2006-09-01 15:30 UTC 1  comment  ·

CBC/AP reports:

A plane caught fire while landing in northeastern Iran on Friday, killing as many as 80 people on board, said state television.

Roughly 60 people are reported to have survived the crash, which happened at an airport in the city of Mashad.

Reports suggest the Russian-made Tupolev TU-154 blew a tire while landing and caught fire.

The Iran Airtour flight had been travelling from the southern city of Bandar Abbas to Mashad, with 147 people on board. It's not clear how many crew members were on board, but none died in the fire, state TV said.

Initial reports said there were 60 dead, but the death toll later rose to 80.

While air crashes are infrequent in Iran, U.S. sanctions against the country have prevented Iran's airlines from receiving new aircraft parts to repair their fleets.

So "US sanctions" are responsible for "Russian-made" planes crashing now? Am I missing something?

Update: Damian Penny notices the same thing issue with Reuters reporting, although at least they work in the "Russian planes are pieces of sh*t" part. Why doesn't Iran build it's own planes? They can build nukes apparently; it can't be too hard to figure out how the build planes -- we've been doing it for 100-odd years. 

Comment #1Fuzzy

2006-09-01 16:19:12

Didn't you know that during the cold war, although the ruskies built their own airliners, all the parts were smuggled into the USSR from the USA, via Israel.

When the Reagan finally decided to turn the thumbscrews on the USSR, it was all over for the Russian commercial aviation industry.

Iran is too busy trying figure out how to launch unmanned "sucide planes" into Israel, to actually figure out how to manufacture parts for their own planes.