However, it does not have similar difficulty buying parts for its Russian planes. Iranian airlines have bought Russian craft in recent years, but usually secondhand ones to save money.

Western nations have offered to open the door to sales of new planes and spare parts in an incentive package aimed at getting it to roll back its nuclear program. Ahmadinejad has vowed never to give up the program.

Iran's 13 airlines have 120 planes, with an average age of 16. Iran Airtour has 12 Tupolevs.

The country's main carrier, Iran Air, has seven Tupolevs among its 43-plane fleet. It also has seven Boeings bought before the 1979 Islamic revolution and 28 European Airbus and Fokker aircraft.

The workhorse of passenger airlines in the former Soviet Union, the Tu-154 has been in commercial service since 1972. More than 900 have been built and more than 160 exported to airlines around the world, particularly in former Soviet-bloc countries and Iran. Because of noise and pollution regulations, the planes do not fly to Western destinations.

Since they were introduced, 62 of the planes, or about 7 percent, have been damaged in crashes or hard landings ¡ª the deadliest in 1984 when a Tupolev landing at an airport in eastern Siberia smashed into cleaning vehicles left on the runway, killing 174 people.

About 5 percent of the comparable 1,800 727s built by Boeing have been involved in crashes, and about 1 percent of the 1,400 Airbus 320s.

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