U.S. must be responsible.
#1 | Posted by mysterytoy at 2009-07-15 02:33 PM
Amazing how these otherwise "reliable" planes are "falling apart at the seams" all at once!?
There are a number of Russians embedded in Israel and we know that Israeli have perfected remote control tools for passenger jets.
.. "Soviet-built Tupolev and Antonov planes have long been the mainstays of the civil air fleets in Russia and former Soviet republics. Once considered reliable aircraft, the most widely used models like the Tu-154 have in recent years gone largely unmodified or updated by aircraft designers.
The Soviet collapse resulted in the sharp decline in government funding for aircraft spare parts manufacturers and for the aircraft manufactures themselves, and many airlines fell behind in maintenance programs for the planes.
Iran has about a dozen Soviet-built Tu-154 airliners. In 2006, Russia negotiated the sale of five Tu-204s to Iran.
In February 2006, a Russian-made Tu-154 operated by Iran Airtour, which is affiliated with Iran's national carrier, crashed during landing in Tehran, killing 29 of the 148 people on board. Another Airtour Tupolev crashed in 2002 in the mountains of western Iran, killing all 199 on board.
The crashes have also affected Iran's military. In December 2005, 115 people were killed when a pre-1979 U.S.-made C-130 plane, crashed into a 10-story building near Tehran's Mehrabad airport. In Nov. 2007, a Russian-made Iranian military plane crashed shortly after takeoff killing 36 Revolutionary Guards members."