Antonov’s Curse: The crash of Sepahan Airlines flight 5915 and the story of the An-140

On the 10th of August 2014, an Iranian airliner lost height and crashed shortly after takeoff from Tehran, killing 40 people and bringing the safety of an aircraft type into question. The plane involved was a little known HESA IrAn-140, an Iranian license-built version of the Ukrainian Antonov An-140 regional turboprop — a model that was seemingly cursed from the moment the first airframe rolled off the assembly line in 1997. Suffering from a string of accidents, poor sales, and premature groundings, the An-140 and its Iranian spinoff gathered such a disastrous reputation that most of the airlines willing to fly them were captive companies owned by the type’s own manufacturers — including the short-lived Sepahan Airlines, which was wholly owned by HESA, Iran’s state aviation company. So when the world learned that a Sepahan Airlines IrAn-140 had gone down in Tehran, there was little assurance that the investigation would be objective — and indeed it was not. The cause of the crash became the subject of a three-way dispute between Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization, Ukrainian air crash investigators, and the independent Interstate Aviation Committee. At the center of the debate were two critical questions: why did the plane’s right engine fail almost at the moment of liftoff, and why couldn’t the pilots maintain altitude afterward? Amid competing arguments from sometimes unreliable actors, the truth is difficult to discern — but there is plenty of interesting drama to be dissected along the way. &loz;&loz;&loz; <img alt="" src="https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:700/0*bAtANPjSj46WQX7u.jpg" style="height:534px; width:700px" /> A derelict An-24 formerly belonging to Aeroflot. (Szabó Gábor) Throughout the mid-to-late 20th century, one of the most prolific and renowned global aircraft designers was the Soviet Union’s Antonov Design Bureau. Based in Kyiv, Ukraine, Antonov’s engineers produced numerous transport aircraft that have since become icons of the Eastern Bloc, including the ubiquitous An-2 biplane, the An-124 heavy lift cargo plane, and of course, the mighty one-off An-225 Mriya, which was the largest airplane in the world until it was tragically destroyed in the opening hours of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. One of the less glamorous Antonov products was the An-24 twin turboprop, which was once the most common regional airliner in the Soviet Union. Over 1,000 were built between 1959 and 1979, and dozens remain in service around the world, especially in Africa, where airlines appreciate the model’s ability to operate out of unimproved airports with minimal or no ground services. But even 30 years ago, it was obvious that the An-24, long out of production, would not be around forever — and so the Antonov Company, now the largest aircraft manufacturer in the newly independent Ukraine, resolved to design and build a successor. The result was the An-140: an airplane that unfortunately turned out to be cursed from the very beginning. <a href="https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/antonovs-curse-the-crash-of-sepahan-airlines-flight-5915-and-the-story-of-the-an-140-2c957bbec2d">Visit Now</a>