BREAKING:'No sign of life' detected at crash site of helicopter carrying President Ebrahim Raisi, others, Iran state TV says https://t.co/Xb5LLyJdwY
— The Associated Press (@AP) May 20, 2024
There is much being said (threatened) from all sides, but here’s the base facts, AFAICT: A selection of Iran’s top officials were returning via helicopter from a ‘dam commemoration’ in Azerbaijan. Helicopters are notoriously not the safest flying machines — especially pre-1979-built helicopters running on spare parts, and flying over some of the nastiest mountainous terrain in the world. One of the three helicopters in the entourage went down, with or without outside interference, and some of the men in that downed helicopter… Well, their legacies are currently being disputed.
There will be more news. There will be developments. I am not sufficiently expert on Iran and its neighbors to place any bets on what comes next, and as far as I know very few other American-accessible social media users are, either. None of which, obviously, will shut any of us up…
I blame the vaccine. #DiedSuddenly https://t.co/bPkRoVtmc0
— Ragnarok Lobster 🐺 (@eclecticbrotha) May 20, 2024
#BREAKING Hamas and Hezbollah mourn death of Iran's Raisi.
Hamas hailed his 'support for Palestinian resistance' and Hezbollah called Raisi a 'protector of resistance movements' pic.twitter.com/m4tUK6SJkS
— AFP News Agency (@AFP) May 20, 2024
And then the plane and the weather took a hard line with him. https://t.co/fEGRrTRaEv
— HawaiiDelilah™ (@HawaiiDelilah) May 20, 2024
Pro tip: don’t run your country in such a way that people greet reports of your death with celebratory dancing and fireworks https://t.co/jHnneUULjC
— Joshua Livestro (@JoshuaLivestro) May 20, 2024
Solidarity with Iranians in a natural disaster, of course.
But a murderous regime that kills Ukrainians, runs Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis?
Kills its own citizens while their daughters shop in NYC in miniskirts, hair uncovered?
The @EUparliament must ask who decided and… https://t.co/VEptqGZKZW
— toomas ilves, ex-verif (@IlvesToomas) May 19, 2024
Ebrahim Raisi, who died aged 63, rose through Iran's theocracy from hardline prosecutor to uncompromising president, as he burnished his credentials to position himself to become the next supreme leader https://t.co/Uab2LDYzSF pic.twitter.com/lr1kjzZ1fH
— Reuters (@Reuters) May 20, 2024
And just when he was about to testify against Boeing. https://t.co/NbB9P7yZVi
— Enhanced Interrogated Poet (@agraybee) May 19, 2024
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash in mountainous terrain near the Azerbaijan border, officials and state media said. Here's how the world reacted https://t.co/RhNl3nnp6H
— Reuters (@Reuters) May 20, 2024
So many billions spent by the Iranian regime on nuclear technology, missiles, drones, and yet no aircraft with reliable tracking to transport leadership. Beware of goverments that are composed of maniacal fanatics with many weapons – yes, that is a double entendre. https://t.co/PwyjckGke8
— HawaiiDelilah™ (@HawaiiDelilah) May 20, 2024
I seem to recall that Yashar Ali’s parents were Iranian immigrants, for what that’s worth…
In case you think the Islamic Republic and the IRGC are trying to act like they’re running a sophisticated operation….state media just published this video saying these are senior IRGC commanders looking over maps near the crash site to determine how they’re going to proceed.… pic.twitter.com/UNEI9kgeU8
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) May 20, 2024
I've done live fact-checking during breaking news events for years.
But the sheer volume of viral misinformation today regarding Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi's helicopter crash posted by fake osint accounts and blue tick grifters for engagement has been something to behold.
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) May 19, 2024
This is why Kim Jong-un only takes the train. Few tins of Fosters, packet of monster munch. Wi-Fi. You can throw all the fog you want at him and he’ll be golden.
— Peter Harris (@PeterHarrisCSU) May 19, 2024
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin’, y’all!
Baud
Thanks, AL.
Marine 1 is a helicopter, but I’d imagine the safety standards are top of the line.
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
Good morning.
p.a.
I don’t expect any change of direction. All fundies of any stripe have is doubling down. Until the tumbrels get rolling.
Baud
@p.a.:
They suppressed the uprising a few years ago pretty good. I’m not sure what it’ll take. Same with Russia.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
I’ve only been on a helo once in my life and that was from shore to ship. Smooth ride, nice day, no issues.
But …
I’ve never been anxious about flying (in fact, I’m actually getting ready to head to the airport) but that one helicopter ride had me more nervous than the proverbial cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
I did a helicopter tour in Hawaii. Enjoyed it. No weather though.
Baud
Can’t help but wonder how things would have played out if Hillary was given a chance to continue Obama’s overtures towards Iran.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
Of all the times I’ve been to Hawaii (only to the island of Oahu, though), I’ve never thought about doing that.
One day, maybe.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
One of the women who work at the Service Desk at the store is Persian, she was quite happy that Raisi was in hell, her words.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: We did helicopter tours in Maui and Kauai.
Baud
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA:
Hawaii is so beautiful.
Princess
Looks like what Adam reported last night — that a credible source reported a prayer leader on the flight had been in communication with people — probably was also misinformation.
A change in leader is always some kind of change but my fear this will be a change for the worse.
Nukular Biskits
@Princess:
I’m sure I’ll be proved wrong, but it’s really hard to see how Iran could do worse than Raisi.
Soprano2
@Baud: It is, at least Maui is. Maybe I’ll go back someday and see other islands.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Princess: Like my father’s one-time secretary said, there’s an old Russian proverb: “Never celebrate the death of the Tsar.”
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
Worse is always an option.
OzarkHillbilly
@Nukular Biskits: After all that talk about snakes yesterday, guess what I found in my garden shed?
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
You sure it wasn’t a Missouri Republican?
Baud
Via Reddit, more Iranian celebration.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Too small.
Geminid
@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: Ibrahim Raisi was widely hated for his role as judge in the 1980s. He and two others toured Iranian prisons and sentenced as many as 5,000 prisoners to death in “5 minute trials.”
Raisi’s more recent accession to the office of President resulted in the intensified enforcement of the women’s dress code that led to the murder of Mahsa Amini.
Princess
@Baud: An Iranian I know refused to vote for Hillary because they thought she was too hawkish on Iran and would end up bombing his family. I understood that.
On the other hand, their family is tight with the regime and I low- key think their role in the US is to stir up trouble, so there you go.
Mousebumples
@Soprano2: we did a helo from Maui to see Molokai and Lanai.
We also did a helicopter tour from Las Vegas, over Hoover Dam, to the Grand Canyon.
I was not as aware of helicopter safety issues then as I am now. 👀
RevRick
One of history’s great “what ifs” is how might Iran be different today if Allen Dulles and the CIA hadn’t orchestrated the overthrow of then Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in August of 1953.
Baud
@Princess:
Ah, yes. the infamous Hillary the Hawk. Donald the Dove meme.
The gaslighting will continue until morale improves.
Baud
@RevRick:
Right. Who knows who Dulles airport would have been named after?
MagdaInBlack
@OzarkHillbilly: Too useful?
Geminid
Ragip Soylu posted some video of the crash site, taken in full daylight. The wreckage is near the top of a very sharp ridge. It looks like the helicopter would have made it with another hundred feet in altitude, or if it had been flying a couple hundred feet to the right. There was more mountain to the left, though.
The helicopter also looked like it hit the ridge skids first and not nose first, like the pilot saw the ridge a couple seconds before he hit it.
Geminid
@Baud: Saqqez, the city where those fireworks are, is in the western, Kurdish portion of Iran. It was a center of resistance when protests broke out over Mahsa Amini death in September of 2022. Ms. Amini was a local woman.
RevRick
@Baud: His bro, John Foster.
bbleh
… And Why It’s Bad News For Biden
A Times Panel Discussion
Baud
@RevRick:
Ah, right. I always mix them up.
Michael Bersin
@Baud:
Nope. Snakes are actually important contributing members of the ecosystem.
Raven
Choppers are fine as long a they pull maintenance.
Baud
@Raven:
Besides, it doesn’t sound like a maintenance issue. It sounds like they shouldn’t have been flying in the mountains in bad visibility.
TBone
Open thread PSA. May is Lyme Awareness month and my civic duty calls. Please keep yourselves aware and alert, and your loved ones too. You may prevent decades of suffering. As always, the more you know…
https://www.oaklandmagazine.com/the-tick-that-took-me-out/
RevRick
@Baud: Shades of Kobe Bryant.
Geminid
The dam Raisi and his Foreign Minister commemorated was not an especially big project. But it was a joint Iran/Azerbaijan effort, and Raisi and Azerbaijan President Aliyev wanted to show a spirit of cooperation. The two countries have been at odds over the long-running Azeri/Armenian conflict close by. That war seems to have been settled finally, and now the program is peace and economic development.
So the two Presidents flew to the remote border for a photo op. Pictures show 8 or so men posed on a riverbank, with mountains in the background. It was a sunny day, but you can see some cirrus clouds up high, like maybe a storm is out there somewhere.
Raven
@Baud: High over the Mekong Delta!
https://flic.kr/p/DTHHQi
Baud
@Raven:
High as in pot or altitude?
sdhays
So when is the Supreme Leader going to celebrate a remote dam?
Raven
@Baud: that’s what I’m talkin bout!
Dorothy A. Winsor
My brother was an Army doctor. Because he sometimes flew evacs, he had to take helicopter flight training. Obviously, there was supposed to be a pilot to fly the chopper, but doctors were supposed to be able to take over in emergencies. Scary thought. My brother did all right taking off and flying, but landing proved to be a challenge.
Kay
@Raven:
Is that a barge (with “E100”) on it?
Baud
@sdhays:
Lots of people out there who deserve free helicopter tours. We should start a GoFundMe.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Assuming no mechanical failure.
’70s era helicopter means ’70s era avionics.
Executive Care: since flying the president is a prestige thing and Iran is that kind place, it’s quite likely the pilots were the highest ranking ones, not the most qualified ones for that type of helicopter.
Cacti
Raisi was by all accounts an awful man, so no great loss there. But a power vacuum in authoritarian regime is a dangerous thing. I hope this can be an opening for better things for the beleaguered people there, though I’m skeptical it will be.
And if there is any change for the better, I hope the loathsome Pahlavi children stay as far from it as possible.
3Sice
Go fever -> controlled flight into terrain (CFIT).
Should have never been up in those conditions.
Geminid
On its way home from spotting the wreckage, the Turkish Aksin drone traced out a Turkish flag complete with crescent moon and star. It showed up nicely on tracking maps.
Now there’s a Turkish/Persian social media spat going on. Turks are like, “Well, we found that missing president for you,” and Iranians are like, “You did not! We found him!”
Anyway
OT – More billionaires for Dump – Miriam Adelson and her $30 billion ready to support/fund Rethugs. We have such an uphill battle.
ETA THIS IS NOT DOOMSCROLLING
Kay
@Anyway:
I get encouraged at how stupid and out of touch our billionaires are, however. They really bet wrong a lot.
Princess
@Baud: You’ll be shocked to learn they’re deeply and actively involved with campus protests right now.
evodevo
On hearing about this, I recalled the Kobe Bryant crash in 2020… low clouds, fog bank, hills…no conditions for VFR…
Ishiyama
I represented a number of refugees from Iran back in the 1980s.
Mike in NC
Having flashback to 1979 when every other wing it in the country put on a “
Mike in NC
Having a flashback to 1979 when half of America’s wingnuts suddenly were wearing “FUCK IRAN” buttons even if they couldn’t find it on a map.
Raven
@Kay: It’s a UH-1
Thor Heyerdahl
@RevRick: And shades of Stevie Ray Vaughan
Glidwrith
@Nukular Biskits: My brother is a helicopter pilot. Nearly lost him three times in ten years and that’s only the ones he’s told me about. One crash ended with his copter upside down and sinking in a lake with him in it.
I’ve lost track of the number of poorly maintained machines that he has had to service himself because they were too dangerous to fly.
Did you know that there is something called the Jesus bolt in the rotor assembly?
As in, “Jesus, don’t fail me now”, because the entire assembly relies on that one bolt to hold the rotor assembly together.
Geminid
Raisi’s helicopter crashed in the Dilmaz Protected area, whose ancient forests contain a wide diversity of plants and animals. A naturalist:
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Helicopter. Mountains. Fog. They never should have taken off. My guess is that someone overruled the pilots.
Starfish
Some of those tweets are ghoulish. All of Iran’s airplanes and flying vehicles are old because they have been under US sanctions for about as long as I have been alive.
A lot of people are glad Raisi’s dead because he was the prosecutor in getting a lot (thousands) of the protestors of the Iran/Iraq war killed by the state.
Also, he has been in charge as the religious crackdowns that have led to the deaths of a couple of teenage girls for the crime of not wearing their head covering. Girls have been stopped by the religious police and “whoopsie” we killed them.
UncleEbeneezer
Xavier
Leaders like Raisi are why theologian C. S. Lewis wrote “Of all forms of government theocracy is the worst…If we must have a tyrant better a robber baron than an inquisitor.”
Geminid
@Geminid: Middle East Eye correspondent Levent Kemal wrote an article about Turkish assistance in the search for the crash site. He said that the Turkish military offered the services of an Akinca drone at 11:36 pm Sunday night. Iran accepted and the drone was able to get its first thermal image of the site at 2:22 am Monday.
A Turkish news agency carried a live feed from the drone that at one point had 3 million viewers.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
Bernie woulda
wonsurvivedAnyway
@Geminid:
My Turkish and Iranian friends seemed to have great affinity and camaraderie based (it seemed to me) on a deep pride that they are NOT ARAB!!
rikyrah
@Kay:
They’d sell their mother for tax cuts
Geminid
@Anyway: I have followed Turkish Twittrr enough to know Turks generally look down on Arabs as backwards. There’s a little bit of a peer rivalry going with Iran. They’re both Muslim nations of around 85 million citizens, but with very different political systems.
Turkiye’s looks stable, but the Iranian Republic does not seem to have a broad base of popular support, especially among young people. I think its days are numbered
The two nations are in conflict in Syria and maybe in Iraq, where Turkiye has increased its influence. They both contend for influence in the wider region.
I haven’t gotten to know Turkish or Iranian Americans, and I’d say you are lucky to have had the priviledge.
ljdramone
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
’70s avionics means probably no FADEC (computerized engine control systems) or “fly by wire” flight controls, but it would be pretty easy for the Iranians to replace the original navigation radios and flight instruments with modern flat-panel displays and nav gear.
I think this is likely to be a case of “get-there-itis” — important person has places to be, weather’s getting worse, and the pilot doesn’t want to tell the VIP no way, we’re not going. See for example the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant in 2020.