Photo AP |
There were no survivors from a Ukraine Airlines Boeing 737-800NG which crashed on Wednesday 8th January near Tehran International Airport.
Flight PS752 took off from Tehran just after 6am local time, it had climbed away from the airport to around 8000 feet but then flight data seems to have come to a sudden halt three minutes into the flight. Five minutes after that the aircraft came down and a scene of complete devastation greeted rescue workers and first responders at the crash site.
The flight to Kyiv was carrying 176 people on board at the time of the crash, according to Ukrainian officials, 82 of those were Iranians, 63 came from Canada, 11 people including 9 crew were Ukrainian nationals. 10 were from Sweden, 4 from Afghanistan, 3 from the UK and 3 Germans.
Yet even before the human remains of those people had been collected, speculation as to the cause of the disaster began to swirl at record speeds and in all directions with little signs of slowing down. At first, it was believed and widely reported that the jet had been bought down by a missile fired by Iran during an attack on US-based in Iraq. These persisted for some time despite the fact that the events took place hours apart and not in the same area from where the rocket attacks were launched from. Some aviation commentators jumped on that bandwagon, highlighting some images of parts of the fuselage showed "obvious projectile holes" indicating it was a definite "shootdown event". Yet, the very same images when enlarged seem to change those holes into rocks. Even if some holes, these can be caused by a number of things, such as an uncontained engine failure, only a forensic like examination will tell for sure.
Iranian officials stipulated that it was a technical fault with the aircraft that caused the tragedy, an engine problem most probable. However, these were hotly disputed by Ukrainian Airlines, saying the aircraft was one of its best, just three years old and had its most recent maintenance check on Monday of this week. "The flight was operated on a Boeing 737-800 NG aircraft (registration UR-PSR). The aircraft was built in 2016 and delivered directly to the airline from the manufacturer. The last scheduled maintenance of the aircraft took place on 06 January 2020." read a statement by the carrier. Ihor Sosnovsky, UIA Vice President Operations doesn't believe crew error was responsible for the disaster either, saying "Given the crew's experience, error probability is minimal. We do not even consider such a chance."