Iran Air resumes flights to Madrid after 17 years
The Iranian flag carrier Iran Air resumed on Wednesday its regular commercial flights between Tehran and Madrid, suspended for 17 years. The flights will be on Wednesdays and will have a weekly frequency, the airline confirmed to Efe, thus connecting with direct line Iran and Spain.
The IR 731 to Madrid left Tehran at 9:50 local time (5:20 GMT) and the plane took off back at 15:30 Spanish time (13:30 GMT).
The launch of this line coincides with a time of crisis in commercial aviation due to the coronavirus pandemic, during which Iran Air chartered four flights to Madrid to repatriate Iranians. According to the ambassador of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Madrid, Hassan Qashqawi, these special flights were "a very good experience" and a kind of "pilot plan". "The four flights carried out during the coronavirus demonstrated that there is a capacity to establish regular flights," the ambassador told Efe.
Qashqavi stressed that Iran is a regional hub and that Spain is one with Latin America: "Flights can be like a platform for travelling to other countries, and therefore go beyond bilateral ties", he said.
When asked why Iran Air stopped flying to Madrid, Qashqaví explained that it was cancelled because "at that time there was no compensation in terms of business and number of passengers".
Today, the outlook is more encouraging, as some 12,000 Iranians reside in Spain and some 7,000 Spaniards travel to Iran every year, according to the embassy's data.
Iran Air, founded in 1962 and whose acronym in Farsi is Homa, is one of the Iranian companies that managed to acquire some Airbus A320 aircraft in 2017, before the contract signed to buy a hundred or so aircraft was in the air with the re-imposition of sanctions against Iran by the United States.
Iran Air's return to Madrid comes after another Iranian airline, Mahan Air, suspended its flights to Barcelona in March. Mahan Air, Iran's first private airline, was founded in 1991 and since 2011 it has been on the list of companies sanctioned by the US for providing financial and technological support to Iran's Revolutionary Guard. Pressure from the US led to the airline being banned in 2019 in France and Germany, where it had several weekly flights, and later in Spain.
