TEHRAN - Aria Air’s flight certification license has been revoked, the director of Iran’s Civil Aviation Organization (CAO), Mohammad-Ali Ilkhani, announced on Saturday.

The decision was made in response to the Aria Air Flight 1525 accident, which occurred on Friday when the plane suffered a tire burst, skidded on the runaway, and hit the Mashhad airport fence and an electricity pylon, leaving 16 dead and 31 injured.
The passenger plane took off from Tehran and touched down at Mashhad’s Shahid Hasheminejad Airport at 6:20 p.m. local time with 153 onboard.
Thirteen crew members and three passengers were killed in the accident. Nine of the 13 dead crew members were from Kazakhstan. Aria Air Managing Director Mahdi Dadpay and his son were among the dead.
The plane belonged to D.E.T.A. Air, a company based in Kazakhstan, but was leased by Iran’s Aria Air for charter flights.
The incident came less than 10 days after Caspian Airlines Flight 7908 -- a 23-year-old Russian-made Tupolev Tu154M plane -- crashed in northwestern Iran, killing all 153 passengers and 15 crew members aboard.
Ilkhani stated that the CAO will seriously deal with airlines that are lax about flight safety.
He said a special committee of the CAO Flight Standards Department was sent to the scene to determine the cause of the accident.
However, preliminary investigations show that the airplane was landing at a speed of 200 miles per hour although the landing speed should not have exceeded 165 miles per hour, he added