DUBAI, By the time President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran sat on his window seat in a helicopter with his foreign minister and six others, heavy clouds were already gathering around the tops of mountains on a border between Azerbaijan and Iran. The helicopter, though weather was deteriorating, took off for a journey of approximately 145 kilometers (90 miles) to the southwest within minutes of boarding.
The Bell 212 helicopter crashed into a mountain slope covered by clouds in less than sixty minutes.
However, the suddenly unexpected death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s hard-line protégé indirectly showed the country’s Shiite ideology and associated contradictions.
International criticism had been received by Iranian military investigators who investigated the crash after they released their report on Ukrainian airliner shooting down by troops last year. Tehran even reached out to Washington for help during hours-long fruitless rescue efforts after the incident; it occurred barely just weeks ago when Israel was hit unprecedentedly and as its uranium enrichment is now closer than ever to weapons grade level. Before and after Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979, even the model of helicopter that crashed can be traced back to Iranian history.
Iranian armed forces investigators have issued two separate statements concerning this tragedy but neither confessed responsibility instead focusing on what could not have caused it. They have dismissed hypotheses such as ‘sabotage’ or ‘explosion from inside’ aiming at Bell 212 which is commonly known as Huey because it was used by American soldiers during Vietnam War.
In conspiracy-minded Iran, some officials still insist foul play could have caused the crash. However, some other officials have begun to ask why the helicopter took off from the site of new Giz Galasi Dam when it was already getting bad weather there.
Mostafa Mirsalim wrote on X social media platform that he had asked prosecutors “to address errors that resulted in loss of life” without giving specifics.
Abbas Abdi also wrote on X that the route taken by Raisi’s helicopter indicated that the pilot did not follow a standard Iranian practice of staying beside main roads in rural areas. This can be useful for navigation as well as providing an emergency landing area. Two former Iranian Presidents, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Abolhassan Banisadr, both survived helicopter crashes while in office.
Data from Cirium indicates that the helicopter which crashed was almost 30 years old and had been delivered to the Iranian Air Force directly from Bell factory in Montreal, Canada. Iran still has twelve remaining registered Bell 212 helicopters.
Bell Textron Inc, situated in Fort Worth, Texas, has stated that it does not conduct any business in Iran or support their helicopter fleet and is unaware of the state of the helicopter associated with this accident.
However, despite its age of several decades, Bell 212 and its military version Huey are still flying worldwide. In the U.S., “Hueys are still used to fly over America’s nuclear forces supporting the silos as well as for certain VIP missions,” says Roger D. Connor, Aeronautics Curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. According to Cirium data, there are still 440 such helicopters around.
“It is a fairly simple aircraft by medium helicopter standards to fly. It typically doesn’t have much automation which can be good or bad for operators,” Connor said. “Higher degree of automation means greater chance of pilot confusion under certain conditions but also enhanced capability during poor visibility.”
Nadimi noted that Iran continues to use Bell 212 helicopters extensively because Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi made deals for buying hundreds of them and had planned to build an Iranian variant. The ones already in Iran when the Islamic Revolution took place then became a key element in killing Iraqis during Iran-Iraq war.
However fewer aircraft were airworthy as western sanctions dried up supplies despite efforts being made to overhaul them locally. For this reason, Iran resorted into covert methods for obtaining parts thereby igniting several criminal cases against US-based individuals who would do anything from safety equipments to complete engines and night vision goggles sought after by respective airplanes.
Former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif blamed sanctions for causing the crash.US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said on his part that “we won’t apologize for our sanctions regime at all” since Iranians have been using planes “to move equipment that supports terrorism.”
“It’s ultimately Iran’s decision to fly a … helicopter under what were reportedly poor weather conditions and nobody else’s,” Miller said.
Meanwhile, there are questions about why it took Iran hours to locate the helicopter despite one of the victims being able to make a phone call, reportedly. In theory, such calls can be traced by security services. It is also unclear if the helicopter had any emergency trackers, which are typical on most aircrafts.
At present, Nadimi suspects that Raisi’s Bell 212 lacked advanced avionics that could have helped in low-visibility flight. However, he stressed that the main issue in the crash might be who allowed this flight to take off when visibility suddenly became poor and whether or not was the pilot giving into pressure from his VIP passengers to fly under all circumstances.
“Pilot error, human error might be to blame but there was a chain of events that caused this crash not just pilot error,” Nadimi said. “That helicopter should have been capable of clearing that terrain and making its way safely to its destination. They were not supposed to fly.”
