Iran’s Mahan Air acquires ex-Saudia Boeing 777s in sanctions-testing deal
Five widebody jets once flying Saudi Arabia’s flag now sit in Iranian hands, exposing how far sanctioned carriers will go to rebuild their fleets
By Diaspora Times Team
Five retired Boeing 777-200ER aircraft, once proudly flying the green and gold of Saudi Arabian Airlines, have turned up in Iran — and the question consuming aviation analysts and sanctions officials alike is not whether it happened, but how.
The aircraft, reported to be in Iran or already in the delivery pipeline, are at the centre of a commercially unusual and geopolitically sensitive movement of American-origin widebody jets into Iran’s sanctioned aviation network. At least two are said to be sitting at Tehran’s Mehrabad Airport awaiting renovation, with reports pointing to Mahan Air, Iran’s largest private carrier, as the intended operator.
Saudi Arabia has moved quickly to distance itself from the transaction. In a statement issued on X, the kingdom’s flag carrier said the aircraft had been sold in June 2023 to a company registered outside Saudi Arabia, in a standard commercial transaction carried out in line with applicable regulations, adding that it had had no further operational or commercial relationship with the aircraft since. Notably, the airline stopped short of naming the buyer or identifying the specific aircraft involved, leaving the ownership trail after that 2023 sale unresolved.
The episode illustrates just how porous the secondary aircraft market has become for a carrier like Mahan Air, which has operated under US Treasury sanctions since 2011 over alleged support for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force. Analysts note that the arrangement does not appear to be a direct government-to-government or airline-to-airline sale. Rather, the available evidence points to a secondary-market transfer routed through Gulf intermediaries and indirect logistics chains, with reports describing temporary registrations, storage sites in the UAE, and ferry routes through Oman as part of the aircraft’s journey.
That pattern is not new for Tehran. Mahan Air’s fleet-building playbook was on display last year, when it took delivery of five Boeing 777-200ERs previously flown by Singapore Airlines, moved through a web of front companies over roughly a year, including a temporary registration under a Malagasy start-up and off-radar ferry flights from Cambodia into Iran. Washington was unimpressed. Earlier this year, the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control widened its net, sanctioning two of those very aircraft — registered EP-MTB and EP-MTE — alongside Mahan Air’s controlling shareholder, two of its board members, and an executive responsible for managing its passenger and cargo services. A Dubai-based parts supplier was also designated, in a move officials framed as a strike against the airline’s ability to keep newly acquired jets flying.
For Riyadh, aviation-industry observers say the retired 777s likely reflect nothing more dramatic than routine fleet renewal. Saudia and its new long-haul carrier Riyadh Air ordered as many as 121 Boeing 787s in 2023, part of the kingdom’s ambition to become a global aviation hub — a modernisation drive that naturally leaves older 777s heading for the resale market. What happens to those airframes once they leave Saudi hands, however, is where the story turns political.
For Tehran, the calculus is more urgent. Iran’s civil aviation sector has been hollowed out by decades of sanctions, limited financing and restricted access to spare parts. Widebody jets like the 777 offer Mahan Air greater route endurance, payload flexibility and foreign-exchange earning potential at a time when its fleet badly needs capacity restoration rather than technological novelty. Analysts at the Middle East Forum, a Washington-based research institute, have been blunt about what they believe should happen next, arguing that Washington should move to sanction the front companies and intermediaries that facilitate these transfers if it is serious about closing the loopholes.
Whether this counts as a Saudi-Iranian commercial breakthrough is itself contested. Social media accounts were quick to bill it as the first significant commercial exchange between the two Gulf rivals since they restored diplomatic relations in a China-brokered deal in March 2023. Most independent analysts are more cautious. The transaction does not appear to be a direct state-to-state sale, and framing it as an official bilateral breakthrough is analytically overstated, even if the broader political thaw between Riyadh and Tehran has plainly made this kind of indirect commercial contact easier to conduct without the diplomatic friction of years past.
What is harder to dispute is the symbolism. Aircraft built almost entirely from American components, once flying under the banner of a close US ally, are reportedly being refurbished on Iranian tarmac for a carrier Washington has spent over a decade trying to isolate. It is, as one industry analysis put it, a reminder that embargoes can slow access, raise costs and increase risk, without fully stopping acquisition — and that in today’s Middle East, even a handful of second-hand jets can carry outsized strategic weight.
For now, the aircraft sit in Iran, their final registrations and operational status still being pieced together by plane-spotters and sanctions officials in real time. For Saudi Arabia, the message is one of distance and denial. For Washington, it is a fresh test of how much enforcement teeth its aviation sanctions regime still has. And for Mahan Air, it is simply business as usual — rebuilding a fleet one contested airframe at a time.
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