White smoke rose from the wreckage of an Iranian fighter jet near Firouzabad, about 770 kilometers south of Tehran, in video aired by the Fars news agency, which is affiliated with the military. Both pilots died.
State media named them as Col. Hamid Reza Ranjbar and Col. Manouchehr Pirzadeh. The two were flying a test flight after the aircraft had been overhauled.
The reports did not say what type of jet it was or why it came down.
An aging fleet
Iran’s air force flies a mix of American planes bought before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, among them the F-14 Tomcat, along with Russian MiG and Sukhoi models. Western sanctions over several decades have made spare parts hard to obtain, and the fleet has aged as a result.
Crashes have followed. In 2022, a fighter jet went down in Iran’s central desert and both pilots were killed. Earlier the same year, another jet came down on a soccer field in Tabriz. Its two pilots died, and so did a civilian.
Iran keeps both its American and Russian types in service, a split that reflects its past ties and present alliances. Keeping them airworthy is the harder part. Sanctions leave the air force short of parts, and the oneindia report on the Firouzabad crash tied the latest loss to those constraints, saying the problems are likely to persist as long as sanctions stay in place.
