Pilot 'alive before Greek crash'

CNN.com ^ | 8/14/05 | CNN

[NathanBookman]

"most of these people don't know a thing about aviation and couldn't tell a 737 from an MD-80."

Oh yea, well one is a big plane and one is a large firecracker! Now who looks like the dope?

[OldFriend]

If the story is true that the plane was on auto pilot and circled for an hour.....none of this makes sense.

The pilot could and should have dropped to a safe altitude where the oxygen masks would have saved them all.

[Kirkwood]

I think "frozen solid" came about by something lost in translation. I can shake your hand and say you're hand is as "cold as ice," but it is just a figure of speech.

[A.A. Cunningham]

You dreamded up that "run out of fuel" nonsense. I've never seen a single report of that.

Cypriot plane may have run out of fuel: source

[konaice]

Been watching the news pics and don't see signs of a fuel fire which makes that even more likely

Report said:
All 115 passengers and six crew died, most burned beyond recognition, when the plane, with neither pilot in control, spiralled down into a mountainous area about 40 kilometres north of Athens.

By the time fire crews got up that mountain all the fire would have burned off.

According to the Greeks:
The plane lost contact about 90 minutes after it left Larnaca, in Cyprus, en route to Prague via Athens, and crashed 90 minutes later, defence officials said.

This info from http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/passengers-may-have-tried-to-fly-crashed-plane/2005/08/15/1123957973385.html Login = unfortunately password = required

[GovernmentShrinker]

I don't know. We've now heard that:
1) the bodies were frozen solid
2) the bodies were burned beyond recognition
3) at least 20 people on the plane were still alive at the time of the crash.

1 & 2 can simultaneously be true, as can 2 & 3, but 1 & 3 can't be, especially when one of the living was the pilot (otherwise the passenger compartment might have been way below freezing, while the cockpit was somehow still insulated, but there's no way 20 people could have been in the cockpit). Apparently there is still a lot of confusion and misinformation, and we'll have to be patient while it gets sorted out.

[COEXERJ145]

Oh yea, well one is a big plane and one is a large firecracker! Now who looks like the dope?

You do.

[konaice]

You will note the link in 44 says "We surmise that the (Helios Airways) plane was heading towards Athens International Airport and that it ran out of fuel,"

However the f16 pilots who watch the crash said no such thing. The engines wer all still turning and burning.

[GovernmentShrinker]

The flight recorder was not ejected from the black box; it was retrieved intact and sent to Paris for decoding. The VOICE recorder appears to have been ejected from it's container and has not yet been found. However, the voice recorder only carries the last 30 minutes of cockpit sound, and so they don't think it's likely to be much help, since the problem get serious much further back in the flight, and all or most of the crew seems to have been unconscious by the time the flight crashed.

[rabidralph]

Maybe Boeing accidentally installed a Jack-in-a-black-box.

[moondoggie]

Remember the Payne Stewart incident?

When jets intercepted his plane, the windows were frosted over and they couldn't see in the plane.

If this plane "supposedly" suffered from the same fate.....how come the windows of this plane were clear?

[Sabatier]

The plane flew at an altitude higher than Mt. Everest.
At that height passengers would die in minutes without
oxygen because their bodies hadn't acclimatized.
In fact the coroner said some people had frozen to
death. It's amazing that there were bodies for him to
examine if the only thing left was the tail of the plane.
And now today there was a plane crash in Venezuela,
every one on board killed.

[cherokee1]

I didn't hear what altitude the fighters met the plane at? If it was cruising @ 35K or thereabouts I'm not buying the moving stewardess story. If she had oxy the rest of the crew would have had it? And all aircrews that I've ever run across know how to trip off an auto pilot. Maybe the Greeks have a neater system? Even if a person is in top physical condition and has time to take a deep breath 60 seconds is all the time there is to avoid suffocation---freezing happens slightly later.

[Final Authority]

Where was the tail section relative to the rest of the crash scene? You are correct, tails don't just fall off unless they are blown off by a bomb inside the fuselage or from the outside by way of air to air or surface to air missile. BTW, who was on this plane that the Greek military might have wanted dead?

[konaice]

If the story is true that the plane was on auto pilot and circled for an hour.....none of this makes sense. I've seen no reports of it circling. It over shot athens and was headed northwest where it crashed.

[cmiller623]

My guess is the fighters shot down the plane rather than have it crash in a populated area. Looking at the timing of when the jets were up doesn't make sense. Something very fishy and wrong here. We probably not here the truth, just like on Flight 800.

[cherokee1]

Cyprus to Athens---less than a thousand miles---do you suppose the Greeks didn't take on a full fuel load for that leg?

[konaice]

and why was the data recorder sent to Paris? Because Greek officials do not have the technical means to handle these boxes.

[A.A. Cunningham]

That's quite the admission that you dreamded(sic) up your earlier assertion:

You dreamded up that "run out of fuel" nonsense. I've never seen a single report of that.

Perhaps you can now post a link to the interview of the F-16 pilots who you claim stated:

However the f16 pilots who watch(sic) the crash said no such thing. The engines wer(sic) all still turning and burning.

[usafsk]

Cockpit oxygen source depends on the plane, but usually is bottle/mask system within arms length. Cabin system is not a tank exactly, but a chemical system triggered by pulling the hose on the mask. That's why they tell you to pull it first to get the oxygen generating chemicals triggered. No tank to top off in the back. Maybe the pilots' system failed, or they just didn't have time. The reality is that the time to react is probably less than 10 seconds at that altitude.