Bell’s Persian factory

HESA began life as an American project. In the mid-1970s the Shah’s Iran was one of the world’s biggest buyers of US military aircraft, and Bell Helicopter’s parent Textron agreed to build a factory at Shahin Shahr near Isfahan to make Bell 214 helicopters under licence, with sweeping technology transfer. The deal was so large that Textron reportedly founded a new division just to run it. Iran even paid for Bell to develop a bigger twin-engine version, the 214ST, and planned to build 50 Bell 214As and 350 214STs at Isfahan. HESA, originally named Iran Helicopter Industries, was established in 1976 to house the work.

The revolution cancels the order

The 1979 revolution killed the plan overnight. The Shah fell, Iran’s orders were cancelled, and Bell took the 214ST home to Texas, flying it for the first time on 21 July 1979 and selling it as a civil helicopter. In a twist that still stings in Tehran, that civil label let the United States approve the sale of dozens of 214STs to Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War. HESA was left with a modern plant, 250,000 square metres of shops and hangars, and no foreign partner. It survived on overhauls, parts manufacture and, increasingly, on reverse engineering the American aircraft already in Iranian hands.

F-5s with new names

The most visible results were fighters built on the Northrop F-5. In 1997 Iran announced the Azarakhsh, presented as its first home-made combat jet; outside analysts saw no differences from the F-5E and concluded it was a rebuild. The twin-finned Saeqeh followed, flying past at Mehrabad on 20 September 2007, though only five single-seaters and one two-seater were made before production moved on. In August 2018 came the Kowsar, launched on a HESA assembly line in front of President Rouhani with glass cockpit and new radar. An Israeli government spokesman dismissed it as a very old American war plane; the IISS suggested Iran’s real problem was sourcing engines and avionics.

An airliner that kept crashing

HESA’s one airliner had a darker story. From 2000 it assembled the Ukrainian Antonov An-140 as the IrAn-140, with plans for 100 aircraft. The programme started with tragedy: in December 2002 an An-140 carrying many of Ukraine’s leading aviation engineers to the inauguration of the first Iranian airframe crashed near Isfahan, killing all 44 aboard. A HESA test aircraft crashed at Shahin Shahr in 2009, and in August 2014 Sepahan Airlines Flight 5915 came down after take-off from Tehran, with only eight survivors. Production ended in 2015, after around ten Iranian-assembled aircraft.

The drone that changed a war

Today HESA matters most for what flies without a pilot. It assembles the Shahed 129, Iran’s Predator-sized armed drone, at about three a year, and it is named as designer and manufacturer, with Shahed Aviation Industries, of the Shahed 136 one-way attack drone. Leaked documents indicate Iran sold Russia 6,000 of them in 2022 at about $193,000 each, and Russia now mass-produces its own Geran-2 version in Tatarstan. HESA has been under US sanctions since 2008 and EU and UK sanctions since 2010, and in January 2023 the EU added further sanctions for supplying drones used against Ukraine.