The crash of a Boeing 737-800 airliner shortly after takeoff from the Iranian capital hit home in the Pacific Northwest on Wednesday. A majority of the 176 people who were killed were on their way to Canada.
The Kyiv-bound flight was the first leg of a journey that should have eventually connected to Canada. The dead include 63 Canadian citizens. The passenger manifest listed at least 12 British Columbia residents, including students at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver's Langara College, several doctors, an engineer, a dental hygienist and an entire Iranian-Canadian family from suburban Vancouver.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said the cause of the Ukraine International Airlines crash will be thoroughly investigated. Flight PS752 took off before sunrise Wednesday morning, local time, from Tehran International Airport bound for the Ukrainian capital with 167 passengers and nine crewmembers on board. There were no survivors. Trudeau said a total of 138 of those on board were connecting to Canada.
"All had so much potential, so much life ahead of them," Trudeau said from Ottawa on Wednesday, addressing mourners. "Your loss is indescribable. This is a heartbreaking tragedy."
Among the British Columbia residents who perished was the Hamidi family from the Vancouver suburb of Coquitlam. Ardalan Ebnoddin-Hamidi was an engineer. His wife, Niloufar Khamsi Razzaghi, had just completed education to become a teacher. And their 15-year-old son, Kamyar Ebnoddin Hamidi, was a high school student.
Coquitlam Mayor Richard Stewart knew the family, and said Ardalan Hamidi was involved in many of greater Vancouver’s infrastructure projects, such as the expansion of a local commuter rail line.
“I am going through my Facebook memories with him now,” he said in a telephone interview with KNKX. “I see his son at construction sites with him, he and his wife and his son, in other cities. Our community will miss him tremendously.”
In a statement released Wednesday, Langara College mourned the death of 26-year-old Delaram Dadashnejad. "We are heartbroken over the fatal tragedy that took place," wrote Lane Trotter, president of the college. Delaram was an international student taking university transfer classes, and was flying home to Vancouver after a visit with family in Tehran, according to the statement.
Also on the list of dead were mother Ayeshe Pourghaderi and her 17-year-old daughter Fatemeh Pasavand, whose family operates a bakery in North Vancouver.
According to social media posts from Canadian travelers, Ukraine International Airlines offered an affordable connection to visit relatives back in Iran using a Tehran-Kyiv-Toronto routing.
The crashed Boeing airliner was a 737-800 model delivered new to the Ukrainian airline in 2016. It's not from the 737 Max series that has been in the news a lot lately.
Canada, like the U.S., does not have diplomatic relations with Tehran, which makes it unclear how much participation Transport Canada and Boeing might be allowed in the crash investigation. The investigation is further complicated because shortly before the plane crash Iran launched a missile attack on two Iraqi military bases used by U.S. and Canadian forces.
"We are ready to assist in any way needed," said Boeing in a brief statement posted to its website that also extended condolences.
Tracking data from the website Flightradar24 shows Flights PS752 making a smooth ascent for a few minutes after liftoff to an altitude of about 8,000 feet before the signal disappears. The pilots are not known to have made a distress call.
In a statement from Kyiv Wednesday, Ukraine International Airlines vice president for operations Ihor Sosnovsky seemed to rule out pilot error as a possible cause of the crash.
"Given the crew's experience, error probability is minimal," Sosnovsky said. "We do not even consider such a chance."
Iranian news reports said that officials had found the plane's black boxes, which would be analyzed by the Iran Civil Aviation Organization. The Iranian government dismissed rumors the plane may have been brought down by a missile.
Canadian Transport Minister Marc Garneau said Canada has offered technical assistance to the investigation in Iran. He declined to rule out any possible causes during a briefing for reporters in Ottawa on Wednesday. Whatever went awry in the sky happened suddenly, he said. Pictures of the wreckage on the ground showed the plane disintegrated into many small pieces.
"Something very unusual happened, but we cannot speculate at this point. There are a number of possibilities," Garneau said. "We will have to wait to obtain more information, perhaps from the black boxes or from other intelligence."
"Canadians have questions," Trudeau said in the same briefing. "They deserve answers."
