By the time Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi boarded his window seat on a helicopter ferrying him, the foreign minister and six others, thick clouds already had begun forming around the mountaintops along the Azerbaijan-Iran border. Despite the worsening weather, the helicopter lifted off for a trip about 145 kilometers (90 miles) southwest to a new oil pipeline near Tabriz.
Within an hour, the Bell 212 helicopter had crashed into a cloud-covered mountainside.
