The C-130, tail number c/n 4399, departed Mehrabad International Airport bound for Bandar Abbas on the Persian Gulf. It carried 10 crew and 84 passengers. Shortly after becoming airborne, the pilot reported engine problems and attempted to return to Mehrabad for an emergency landing. The aircraft never made it back to the runway. It came down in a densely populated area, striking an apartment building where many Iranian air force personnel and their families lived. The irony was devastating: a military aircraft crashed into military housing.

Forty of the passengers worked for Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting. Others represented the Islamic Republic News Agency, the Iranian Students' News Agency, Fars News Agency, and several newspapers. They were reporters, cameramen, and producers, the people whose job was to document events. Their own deaths became the story instead. The sheer concentration of media professionals on a single military transport flight meant that the crash struck Iran's journalistic community with particular force. Newsrooms across Tehran lost colleagues in a single afternoon.

The Aviation Safety Network's final accounting recorded 106 deaths: all 94 aboard the aircraft and 12 people on the ground. Other reports varied widely. Tehran's mayor cited 128 total deaths. The Interior Ministry confirmed 116 bodies recovered. The discrepancies reflect the chaos of a crash in a residential area, where the line between aircraft casualties and ground casualties blurred in the wreckage of a collapsed building. At least 90 people sustained serious injuries. Emergency crews arrived within three minutes, but riot police had to be called to control crowds of onlookers who blocked access to the site.

The C-130 that crashed was an American-built aircraft, purchased by Iran's former government during the 1970s. U.S. sanctions had prevented Iran from buying new Western aircraft or obtaining spare parts for its existing fleet for decades. Iranian officials pointed to the sanctions as the root cause of the country's poor aviation safety record. This crash was the deadliest aviation disaster in Iran since February 2003, when 275 people died in a military transport crash in the south. The pattern was stark: aging aircraft, unavailable parts, and a military that continued to fly missions on machines designed for an era that had ended with the 1979 revolution.