The crew of an IranAir jet which crashed in a snowstorm, killing 71 people, reported a technical failure before the disaster, it has emerged.
The Boeing 727 operated by Iran’s national airline was carrying 106 people when it crashed and broke into several pieces as it was making an emergency landing in the city of Orumiyeh on Sunday.
The pilots had reported a technical failure to the control tower, the semi-official Mehr news agency said, quoting a deputy provincial governor, Ebrahim Fatholahi.
The nature of the technical failure was unclear. A spokesman for the Iranian civil aviation organisation, Abbas Mosayebi, said only that the plane “faced an incident”, state TV reported.
The network also said the aircraft disappeared from radar and went down in farmland after making a second attempt to land. There was no word on what might have caused the crash.
The aircraft was heading from Tehran to Orumiyeh, the capital of West Azerbaijan province, a distance of about 460 miles.
State TV showed footage of rescue workers and farmers searching for survivors on Sunday night in parts of the wrecked plane under snowfall and in the dark.
Thirty-five people survived, including two crew members, said Javad Mahmoudi, another deputy governor for West Azerbaijan. He put the number of confirmed dead at 71.
Some of the passengers were only slightly injured and able to walk off the plane, but some had to be taken to hospital, Mr Mosayebi said.
Heavy snow complicated rescue efforts, said the head of the State Emergency Centre, Gholam Reza Masoumi, according to the semi-official Fars news agency. That report also said there was fog in the area.
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