The passengers were in their seats. The bags were in the hold. The Boeing 737 was ready to push back for Iran. Then, on Monday evening, 28 September 2026, lawyers and court enforcement officers walked up to the aircraft at Istanbul Airport with a seizure order, and nobody went anywhere.

The jet was EP-KPB, a Boeing 737-500 of Tehran-based Caspian Airlines. According to Turkish media, it was impounded over a debt of about €3 million claimed by ACM Temsil Gözetim, a Turkish aviation representation and supervision company. Everyone on board, passengers and crew, was taken off and returned to the terminal. The aircraft stayed behind on the apron.

It is the aviation equivalent of having your car towed with the family already strapped in, and it says a good deal about how hard it has become for Iranian airlines to operate abroad.

What happened at the gate

The first public reports came from Turkish aviation media and were quickly picked up by aviation watchers online.

Caspian Airlines later acknowledged what it called temporary operational restrictions on one of its Boeing aircraft because of an administrative issue in Turkey, and said it had taken steps to deal with the debt. The airline told reporters it expected the jet to return to Iran on Tuesday; whether that happened has not been confirmed.

A Turkish government official confirmed the seizure but would not go into detail. The Iranian Civil Aviation Organization said legal and administrative follow-up was continuing and that it was doing everything necessary to get the aircraft released quickly.

Old jets, tight money, new sanctions

The aircraft itself is a reminder of how Iran’s airlines survive. The 737-500 is a member of Boeing’s Classic family, a line whose production ended around 2000. Decades of sanctions have kept Iranian carriers from buying new Western aircraft or genuine spare parts, so they fly what they have for as long as they can.

The seizure also comes days after new US secondary sanctions on Iran’s aviation sector took effect on 25 September, according to Euronews. They target Iranian airlines and warn foreign airports and service companies that keep serving them that they could be sanctioned themselves. Turkey has not joined those measures, and Iranian flights to Turkish airports have continued, but the pressure on anyone doing business with Iranian carriers is rising.

Iran, for its part, has said it wants to take the US restrictions to the International Civil Aviation Organization. In the meantime, a single unpaid bill in Istanbul was enough to ground one of its aircraft.

Can you really seize an airliner?

Yes, and it happens more often than most passengers realise. Creditors around the world use court orders to detain aircraft over unpaid airport fees, fuel bills, leasing payments or maintenance invoices, because an airliner is a valuable asset that cannot easily be hidden. What is unusual here is the timing: most seizures happen to parked aircraft, not to one with a full cabin minutes before departure.

Sources: aeroTELEGRAPH, Euronews, Al Arabiya, Haberler.com, Airport Haber