After lobbying by chief executive Touraj Zanganeh, the Iranian Civil Aviation Organisation and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, IranAir (IR, Tehran Mehrabad) has resumed flights to Europe less than three days after they were initially suspended for reasons unspecified. At the time the termination of flights was announced on Sunday, March 8, the secretary of the Association of Iranian Airlines, Asadani Samani, claimed that the "unknown reasons" were a result of US sanctions rather than COVID-19 restrictions.
In a brief statement issued on March 10, IranAir said that all European flights, except those to Vienna, Stockholm Arlanda, and Gothenburg Landvetter which have stopped flights due to restrictions imposed resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak, would resume normal service effective March 11.
In February, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) expressed concern that the two A330-200s and sole A321-200 IranAir had deployed on its European services were not using the latest software updates. As a result, the airline elected to withdraw the use of the aircraft, maintaining its European flying programme with its fleet of four A300-600s and two A310-300s. However, following the brief suspension, ch-aviation analysis of Flightradar24 ADS-B data shows flight IR721 from Tehran Imam Khomeini to Frankfurt International on March 11 operated using A320-200 EP-IEE (msn 303) and with what appears to have been a technical stop at Rimini, Italy on both the inbound and outbound sectors.
According to the ch-aviation schedules module, Iran Air's EU network entails flights from Tehran Imam Khomeini to Amsterdam Schiphol (2x weekly), Cologne/Bonn (1x weekly), Frankfurt (3x weekly), Gothenburg (1x weekly), Hamburg Helmut Schmidt (2x weekly), London Heathrow (3x weekly), Milan Malpensa (2x weekly), Paris CDG (2x weekly), Stockholm Arlanda (2x weekly) and Vienna (2x weekly).
