Re: What Made My Day Today? :-)

Chabahar project is now confirmed continuing regardless, plus an additional airport is being constructed there also. So China needs more than just the Pakestan-Afghanestan-Russia route. It is safer also to have more than one "silk road".
There were some route options for the ancient Silk Road as well.
I bet Raisi and Amirabdollahian both knew of that, thus their measures were not that anti-Iranian after all. They probably knew they could share the opportunities with Saudis and Pakestanis and Afghanis instead of getting all that for themselves (what China wanted all along).
This reduces the chances that their crash was planned. So either it was the work of some business Capones internal to Iran (their numbers are increasing) who wanted it all and weren't willing to share such once in a lifetime opportunities with other nations in the region, or the downward mountain drift really only affected the middle helicopter, somehow. Sudden formation of fog areas indicates such drifts to begin with. Cold air pours down (right after passing over the mountains - as studied even in high schools) and creates tiny water droplets lower down. I don't know how uniform or chaotic such downward drifts can be, so cannot make any reasonable comment on that possibility.
It must be dependent on the shape of the mountains and wind speed, so it can be studied if wind speed data is available. They can make a model of those mountains where the crash occurred, and flow evaporated cold nitrogen steam over them in various directions and see how wide or narrow the resulting bulk downward motion of the air can be, and how they compare with the distances between the three helicopters.
The conversations with the only remaining passenger that lived a couple of hours after crash and answered to a mobile phone that rang beside him (it was not his) shows that he had not become aware of something going wrong inside the helicopter during the seconds before crash, and knew nothing about the crash to begin with. He'd just come to, finding himself on the ground between the trees and bushes, seriously injured. But he may have been dosing off before the crash, or the sabotage was limited to the area where pilots were, and by the time crash occurred nobody other than pilots had become aware of some sort of sabotage having been planned and carried out.
I wonder why such helicopters do not always have a Black Box so the possible conversations between the pilots could be heard to help determine the nature of the crash. Some Bell 212 have those, but I haven't seen a single word pointing to it in this crash. The cockpit voice recorder or a flight data recorder are "options" for this model. Ridiculous. Especially for a Presidential copter.
Some speculate on copter being overweight also, which doesn't make sense, as that helicopter could lift 5 metric tons of people and equipment, way more than was needed for 8 persons traveling light.
There are other possibilities as well of course. Negligence is one. The main pilot may have noticed an issue in the navigation instruments of the copter early on, and decided to continue just by relying on visually following that formation with the front one, and when they entered the fog forming on their paths he lost that option and could only increase elevation in a blind flight and thus hit the mountain despite that effort. This is a possibility. But again, who knows.
Other forms of negligence are possible also. The repair crew of the helicopter, in their routine inspections may have just filled out forms to make their jobs faster and easier, especially when trips were relatively short and frequent. Such old helicopters should be prone to mechanical failures. Iranians have gotten pretty good in building helicopters. Was this one the best they could offer to carry the President?... There are some thirty different helicopters that Iran builds today, all by herself. Most are based on various Bell designs, including newer ones than the 212. None were better than an old Bell 212? This is crazy. Boils down to gross negligence.
Anyway, anything to distract the pilots for a few seconds inside fog was all that was needed.
Back to this entry. The huge oil deal is gone. To Saudis. But today I found that the Chabahar deal is continuing in full force, so not all is lost. Plus yet another American backed terrorist attempt in that area two days back to sabotage it was made (and foiled successfully). That project is alive! Hence this entry :)