In very thick fog! No one in the convoy realized that President Raisi's helicopter had crashed

The helicopter of Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi crashed in a mountain. To this conclusion comes the open data analysis expert of the German newspaper BILD, Julian Röpke.

The journalist himself pilots small planes as an amateur. In an earlier post, he clarified that Raisi was on board a Bell 212 helicopter manufactured in 1994. Pilots of this model of machine can only rely on visual flight, ie. based on ground reference. The helicopter is not designed to perform flights in difficult weather conditions. It is equipped with only a small and less than perfect GPS navigation device. It is extremely difficult for pilots to fly blind, ie. to operate the machine according to tools in poor visibility.

On Sunday afternoon, Raisi boarded the helicopter after the opening ceremony of the Giz-Kalassi Dam on the Arax River, near the Khudaferin Dam. One third of the air route to Tabriz passes through the Arasbaran Mountains, also known as the Armenian or Karachadag Mountains. Its height reaches almost 3000 meters and is covered with dense forests. On the same day there was such a thick fog that it was almost impossible for the pilots to make a visual flight. Therefore, Röpke believes that the helicopter crashed in the mountains and defines the flight as "suicidal" for its crew and passengers.

"The helicopter was trying to fly over the valleys. But on one of the last mountain passes, before descending again into the valley, at an altitude of 2,250 meters, it crashes into the mountain. Two other helicopters flew in front, with a Soviet Mi-8 behind. Weather conditions at the time of the crash were so bad that no one noticed how one of the helicopters left the convoy and crashed into a mountain. They only found out when they arrived in Tabriz”, Röpke explains.