Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi — often seen as a potential successor to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei— is missing after his helicopter went down in the northwest of the country on Sunday, officials said.
Iran’s Vice President Mohsen Mansouri said contact has been made with one of the helicopter passengers and one of the flight crew, although the connection had frequently been interrupted.
A report by official Iranian news agency IRNA says that it seems the incident was not serious, but does not provide an update on Raisi’s wellbeing or that of any other passengers. Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was also reportedly on board the aircraft.
Update (NYT):
The head of Iran’s Red Crescent Society, Pirhossein Kolivand, told state TV that search and rescue teams have not located the site of the helicopter crash after more than 10 hours of looking, and have made no contact with anyone on board. Any rumors to the contrary were false, he said. Kolivand said rescuers were using their best guesses to set the search area and had no confirmation of the exact location of the missing helicopter.
Could be Mossad, too! Or wind, I guess; Helicopters are death traps
Or their own government, not very well known for stability. Or yeah just a helicopter
Is the government allowed to question the leader’s son?
Helicopters are 100% death traps. They are very sensitive to up/down drafts often found in mountain terrain. They have no ability to glide like a plane in the event of an engine failure. If they’re not pressurized/o2 equipped they have a maximum altitude which quickly becomes an issue when you are already in the thin air of a mountain.
This is actually not true: https://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a20559/how-helicopters-land-safely-engine-cuts-out/
My grandfather was a Marine and later a Secret Service agent. He didn’t tell many stories, but one of the few he did was about riding a helicopter down to the ground through autorotation during engine-out testing – this was apparently while they were qualifying the original Marine One for Eisenhower’s use.
Helicopters are sometimes rightly derided as “a collection of spare parts flying in loose formation” but in this case it seems like they were spitting in the face of God and daring him to do something about it – flying into dangerous terrain, in inclement weather, in what very likely was an old and ill-maintained aircraft. That’s a lot of bad choices to make at once.
Totally. We’ve had our fair share of accidents involving helicopters in my city for instance…