An Iranian passenger plane skidded off the runway during its landing in northeast Iran and crashed, shredding the cockpit into a tangled mass of wreckage and killing 17 people, the state news agency said. The IRNA news agency reported that the tires failed on landing and it skidded into a wall, though no wall was visible in the footage. “Instead of landing at the beginning of the tarmac, the plane landed in the middle of the runway,” the ISNA news agency quoted deputy transport minister Ahmad Majidi as saying. “Because the tarmac's length is short, it has gone off the tarmac and crashed into the opposite wall,” he said. The Russian-made Ilyushin-62 plane from the privately owned Aria Airlines was carrying 153 passengers and flew from the capital Tehran to the northeastern city of Mashhad, 1,000 km away. Local official Ghahrman Rashid told the state news agency that another 20 people were injured in the crash and that all survivors had been evacuated from the scene. The manager of Aria Airlines was killed in the crash, the agency said. On July 15, an Iranian passenger plane crashed soon after take off, killing 168 people aboard. It was the latest in a string of deadly crashes in recent years that have highlighted Iran's difficulties in maintaining its aging fleet. US sanctions prevent Iran from updating its 30-year-old American aircraft and make it difficult to get European spare parts or planes as well. The country has come to rely on Russian aircraft, many of them Soviet-era planes that are harder to get parts for since the Soviet Union's fall.
