The crash of a Boeing 727 near Tehran

The Boeing 727-86 with registration number EP-IRD (serial number 19817, serial number 537) was launched in 1968 and made its first flight on February 17 . Its three turbojet engines were the Pratt & Whitney JT8D-7B ^[1] .

Earlier this Monday, Iranian dispatchers went on strike, which led to the cancellation of hundreds of domestic flights. Then at 16 o'clock the strike was interrupted, and flights resumed. At 17:40, a Boeing 727 departed from Mashhad Airport , which operated domestic flight 291 to Tehran, and had 8 crew members and 120 passengers on board (at first 8 crew members and 116 passengers were mistakenly indicated in the media) ^[2] .

At 6:52 p.m., the dispatcher at the Tehran airport in Mehrabad gave the crew a direct approach approach to runway 29. Then, at about 7:05 p.m., the dispatcher instructed the crew to make a 360 ° turn to access the non-directional beacon of the Varamin approach. Not receiving instructions from the dispatcher, the pilots were 17 miles north. Then, on the approach, the co-pilot noticed the commander that VORTAC was giving the wrong radial approach, but he did not respond to this message. At 19:11, the Boeing, falling in bad weather conditions, 18.1 miles (29 km) north of the airport crashed into the mountains of the Elburs Range and completely collapsed. All 128 people on board died. At the time of the events, it was the largest plane crash in Iran ^{[1] [3]} .

The likely cause of the disaster was the failure of the course-glide path system of the airport and the primary radar ^[1] . Subsequently, the Minister of Civil Aviation of Iran and five other officials were convicted in the case of the disaster of flight 291 ^[4] .