History
Iran's aviation industry infrastructure was by and large established in the 1930s, at the time of the Shah Reza Pahlavi, where the German Junkers & Co Aviation provided the foreign expertise and assistance. The industry was later expanded in the 1970s in the reign of Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, benefiting from the boosted oil revenues. Not only did the Shah order vast quantities of America’s most advanced weapons, he was also acquiring the capability to produce them in Iran. Under a multibillion-dollar industrialisation programme, the Shah commissioned US arms firms to build entire weapons factories from scratch in Iran. Thus Bell Helicopter (a division of Textron, Inc.) was building a factory to produce Model-214 helicopters in Isfahan. Northrop was also a joint partner in Iran Aircraft Industries, inc., which maintained many of the US military aircraft sold to Iran and was expected to produce aircraft components and eventually complete planes. These efforts represented a large share of US industrial involvement in Iran, and were a centrepiece of the Shah’s efforts to develop modern, high-technology industries.
After western sanctions following the Iranian Revolution, the general official policy of Iranian government changed from having the best available in the world to being able to manufacture independently in order to meet domestic needs, specially of technological products and therefore becoming "sanction-proof". In no other field this urgency was higher than aeronautics. Therefore Iran has avoided the need to purchase better western aircraft available to it from time to time in favor of inferior ones that could be manufactured in Iran through arrangements of purchasing licenses and technologies as well as reverse-engineering parts, mostly to avoid situations that Iran has gone through during 1980s till now by not being able to maintain what it had due to domestic technological starvation.
Read more about this topic: Iran Aviation Industries Organization
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