Iran military plane catches fire, no casualties

Reuters: An Iranian military training plane caught fire and made an emergency landing at Tehran's domestic airport on Monday but both pilots escaped the incident unharmed, the official IRNA news agency reported.

TEHRAN, April 14 (Reuters) – An Iranian military training plane caught fire and made an emergency landing at Tehran's domestic airport on Monday but both pilots escaped the incident unharmed, the official IRNA news agency reported.

Fire-fighters extinguished the blaze in the aircraft at Mehrabad airport, which handles domestic flights from and to the Iranian capital of 12 million people, it quoted Tehran fire department spokesman Behrouz Tashakol as saying.

Another news agency, Fars, had earlier reported that parts of the airport caught fire "with dense plumes of smoke in the sky around it", but the IRNA report made no mention of the fire spreading from the plane.

Fars said in a separate report a Russian-made training aircraft had crashed near the airport after experiencing technical problems but that the two pilots parachuted to safety.

Mehrabad airport is located in the outskirts of Tehran.

Experts say Iran has a poor air safety record, with a string of crashes in the past years, many involving old U.S.-built aircraft bought before the 1979 Islamic revolution. (Reporting by Hossein Jaseb and Hashem Kalantari; Editing by Stephen Weeks)