A pretty neat article.
In April 2014, a New York Times reporter passing through Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport spotted a small plane sporting a tiny but unmistakable American flag on its tail. Because of sanctions limiting commercial interaction between the US and Iran, the stars and stripes were a jarring and mysterious detail, enough to warrant a dispatch in the paper headlined “Iran Gets an Unlikely Visitor, an American Plane, but No One Seems to Know Why.”
Reports credited spotters, for whom the “tracking of planes has become a kind of global sport,” with providing images and information that tracked the plane’s prior movements. Photographs culled from JetPhotos.net and other online databases revealed that the plane had been sighted in Zurich, around the time of the World Economic Forum; previously it was spotted heading to Ghana from the UK. Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) records showed that the plane was registered under a Bank of Utah trust, which had shielded the identity of the true owners.
After the New York Times coverage revealed that a Ghanaian mining company headed by the brother of that country’s president had used the aircraft to travel to Tehran, an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman clarified that there were no Americans on the plane. The Ghanaian mining company that leased the plane from the Bank of Utah trust insisted that they had not violated any FAA regulations, but according to US officials, concerns remained about the legality and transparency of an American-registered plane being used for any commercial or diplomatic purposes in Iran. These points would have never come to light if not for the pictures snapped in London, Zurich, and Tehran. With all the questions left unanswered in the Mehrabad affair, one thing was certain: If no one had spotted it, the plane wouldn’t have existed.
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And let's get one thing straight. There's a big difference between a pilot and an aviator. One is a technician; the other is an artist in love with flight. — E. B. Jeppesen
