Latest US and European sanctions pile pressure on Iran's aviation sector

US and several European governments accuse Tehran of using civilian planes to transfer arms to allies

The US Treasury says Iran Air has a history of transporting goods on behalf of the country's military forces. Getty Images

The UK, Germany and France are imposing fresh sanctions against Iran, with a focus on its commercial aviation sector, which experts say is crumbling after decades of trade restrictions.

The new measures follow US claims that Tehran has supplied powerful ballistic missiles to Russia for use in Ukraine “within weeks”.

Sanctions severely affect how Iran’s planes - both commercial and military - are able to fly due to their inability to legally purchase spare parts. The US, UK and EU contend that Iran uses civilian planes to supply arms and advisers to allies including Syria, Venezuela and Russia.

The EU and UK said air services and agreements had been cancelled and they would "work towards imposing sanctions on Iran Air,” which could restrict its operations in Europe.

Iran's dwindling air fleets

Sanctions against Iranian aviation, led by the US, have been in place in varying intensity since the 1979 Iranian revolution, when one of Iran’s first actions was to hold 53 US diplomats and citizens hostage for nearly 450 days. Iran’s post-1979 theocracy says the US supported an oppressive dictator, Shah Pahlavi, prior to the uprising. The new regime also cancelled aircraft orders with the US.

There have been brief pauses to sanctions, during a short-lived US-Iran thaw in relations in the 1990s when Iran was allowed to purchase helicopters from US firm Bell, albeit ones made in Canada. But with many years between the sanctions exemptions, wear and tear has built up on airframes. This may have been one reason for President Ebrahim Raisi’s crash in a 30-year-old Bell chopper in May.

According to the US Treasury, “Iran Air has a history of transporting goods on behalf of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces Logistics (MODAFL).”

The airline was briefly exempt from sanctions between 2016 and 2018 under the nuclear deal, or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated by Barack Obama, US president at the time, which was dismantled later by Donald Trump during his tenure as president.

The nuclear deal involved UN inspectors gaining access to Iranian nuclear sites in exchange for an easing of sanctions.

According to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank, sanctions against Iran Air have reduced its operational fleet to only 16 aircraft, following difficulty obtaining spare parts. Turkish Airlines - which serves a country with a similar population – about 90 million – has more than 300 operational aircraft.

Eating the fleet

Iran has over the decades engaged in strenuous efforts to "cannibalise" parts from aircraft, such as Boeing 747s purchased from the US in the 1970s, in order to keep others flying when their parts fail. Iran's last Shah-era 747 was retired in 2014.

"By definition, cannibalising one aircraft to make serviceable another means that the donor aircraft is unserviceable. Such processes compound as more donor aircraft are required to sustain a depleting number of serviceable ones," says James Beldon, a former RAF Group Captain and an expert on air power.

"The work involved is at least twice that required to install a new part, and there are risks involved in damaging donor parts as they are removed from one aircraft and installed on another. Aeroplanes are delicate and fickle: it’s never guaranteed that a cannibalised part that was apparently serviceable on the donor aircraft will behave itself similarly on the receiver aircraft," he told The National.

Iran briefly had a window to purchase hundreds of new commercial airliners from Airbus and Boeing during the short-lived nuclear deal, but only a tiny number were delivered before Mr Trump pulled out of the deal.

"Ultimately, you will simply run out of parts or aeroplanes without a proper supply chain. To that end, Iran has been remarkably successful in sustaining fleets that should in theory have been dead decades ago: their F-14 fleet being the principal example. Indigenous engineering, advances in 3D printing, industrial espionage and clever but illegal commercial practices have been exploited by Iran to achieve the seemingly unachievable."

Fake airlines

Babak Taghvee, at the Washington Institute, has highlighted how new sanctions against Iran Air could force Tehran to “double down” on building the assets of smaller, unsanctioned airlines.

An example was Mahan Air - reportedly founded in response to sanctions on Iran Air. Experts say Iran then tried to circumvent the impact of sanctions on Mahan Air by spinning off subsidiaries as purportedly new and unrelated companies, including another airline, Yazd Air.

Not all of the ostensibly civilian-purpose aircraft are commercial models.

Pouya Air is another airline familiar to defence analysts, widely believed to be used for weapons transfers. Allegedly a spinoff from Yas Air, which was sanctioned in 2012, the airline includes a fleet of Brazilian Embraer military transport planes, as well as Ilyushin Il-76 cargo planes.

One of the latter aircraft, with a call sign EP-PUS, has repeatedly been tracked flying to Damascus Airport and Moscow. A Soviet era multi-role military transport plane, it can carry about 40 tonnes of cargo.

One defence analyst who closely tracks Iranian flights, but chose not to comment publicly on the issue, told The National that Israeli air strikes often strike Syria following the aircraft’s arrival, as well as other Iranian planes - including at airports in the capital Damascus and in Aleppo.