For years I had an irrational fear of flying. I fly more than the average person, and although my trepidation was never something that kept me grounded, the slightest hint of turbulence sounded an internal alarm.

It has been just in the last few years, when I started making frequent visits to Iran, that flying in Western commercial planes became more palatable to me. Suddenly, next to the slew of Iranian carriers, United, Continental, Lufthansa and the like didn’t seem all that bad.

In six trips to Iran I’ve taken over 80 domestic flights. You see, travel within Iran poses some very real dilemmas. It’s a very large country; roughly three times the size of France. Its roads are very dangerous, with among the highest number of annual traffic fatalities in the world. Couple that with vast stretches of barren landscape, and “let’s drive there” never sounds that enticing or practical.

Flying become my default mode of travel. Although it never felt safe, it seemed better than the alternatives. And it offers its share of conveniences: more often than not, you could expect to arrive at your destination much more quickly than by car, and unlike in many countries, Iranian air travel is quite affordable, with most one-way tickets costing between $20-40. Still, air travel in Iran, with its extraordinarily high incidence of accidents has become infamous around the world.

It wasn’t always this way, however. For a developing nation, Iran has a very extensive network of domestic airports with service to even the most remote regions. It is one of the few enduring legacies of the Shah, and, unfortunately, the aircrafts that service them are one of the others.

While most Iranians blame their government, which too often relies on blind faith as their tool to solve modern day problems of technology and science, many are also rightfully pointing a finger at the US for it’s outdated sanctions prohibiting the sale of aircrafts to Iran and greatly limiting Iran’s freedom to buy spare parts for planes it already owns.

The policy allows for Iran to buy parts for aircrafts built in the US, but limits the amount of parts sold to constitute less than 10% of any finished aircraft.

From experience I can report that the state of Iran’s fleet is dilapidated at best, and all too often shockingly bad.

In the wake of this week’s horrific accident, a Tehran councilman aptly asked in the pro-reform daily Sharq, “How much longer do we have to use planes that should be sent to the scrapheap?" While reformers are asking how so many journalists could be allowed to travel together in a plane that had been grounded several times, this tragedy has elicited an angry response from all political factions, rare in a nation that is usually divided on such major issues.

Although in March Washington agreed to loosen the sanctions as incentive to Tehran to give up its nuclear aspirations, there has been no record of any sales of parts to Iran, and nothing that indicates any impending transactions.

Just last month Reuters reported that Iran Air, the state-owned carrier, had to stop using several of its best planes. The airlines spokesmen stated that, "We have grounded five Airbuses out of 16 because we are unable to purchase the engines.”

This poses a very real problem for people like me, because after several hair-raising flights I decided to follow the advice of a friend who works in Iran’s air traffic control. He told me that I should stop flying the Russian crafts, especially the Topolovs, which many Iranians now call “Fall From the Sky.” He suggested that I stick with the flights that used the handful of Boeing, Airbus and Fokker (Dutch) planes.

I asked him what to do in case I couldn’t get on one of those flights. “Take the train,” he replied.

I’m remembering an encounter I had two years. As I waited for a return flight to Tehran in the airport of Mashhad, Iran’s holiest city, I ran into a friend from the capital. I was boarding my Airbus flight and he was waiting for a Topolov; scheduled to leave two hours earlier, the plane still hadn’t left Tehran.

He was very sharply dressed as always, but I could sense some embarrassment. We generally communicated in Farsi, but he wanted to give me a message that his fellow passengers would not understand. He told me, “Tell America that only Iranian people want Boeings and Airbuses, not for the government.”