Posted on 08/14/2005 2:57:41 AM PDT by beyond the sea
ATHENS - A Cypriot airliner carrying 115 passengers and six crewmembers, crashed north of Athens on Sunday, the defense ministry and fire department said.
The Helios Airways flight crashed at about 12:20 p.m. near the coastal town of Kalamos, just north of the Greek capital. Witnesses told Athens radio station they saw the plane, which was being followed by fighter jets, go down.
Helios Airways in a privately owned Cypriot airline.
No...... it said they "were frozen"..... not freezing, as I understand it.
Quite a difference. People can be "frozen" from being held by terrorists..... not "freezing" from temperature.
Well, if it's not a question of hypothermia, can you have crappy air quality while maintaining pressurization? Are there O2 sensors as well as pressure sensors?
Supposedly, yeah, there are cabin pressure alarms that go off. If the packs (the A/C and pressurization units, which are driven off the engines) both failed, or there was a leak, the crew should've known instantly. An "A/C problem" sounds like an issue with one or both of the packs. But if both packs stopped working, they should've had time to descend because it's not like all the air would instantly rush out of the plane like in an explosive decompression.
This is getting weirder.
}:-)4
A target mentioned by OBL. Coincidence?
And if it was decompression, would frost have formed on the windows? Could the fighter jets have seen that if they were close enough?
Blood oxygen capacity - which varies between persons - could play a part in that.
O2 masks were reportedly deployed, indicating decompression.
What language was the text message? Better translation needed. Frozen suggesting cold, fear or both?
A lot should be clarified by black box info.
Apparently fighter jets were close enough to report they could see the oxygen masks were hanging inside the plane.
(per EuroNews TV)
That, I don't know. I think the packs just take "bleed air" from one of the compressor stages in the jet engines and feed it into the cabin. I don't think there's anything like an air quality sensor, but I could be wrong. I don't know if the cockpit and the cabin use different packs or if it can be switched, or how that works. I know just enough about airplanes to wish I knew how to fly one in real life instead of on a computer. :)
It just sounds odd that something could happen to incapacitate the pilots, but not the passengers. And, if the passengers knew the crew was out cold, I wonder if any of them tried to get into the cockpit. Hey, if it was common knowledge that the flight crew was incapacitated, TSA be damned, I'm gonna want *somebody* to try and get up front and at least hold the plane straight and level. Maybe Joe Amateur couldn't land a jetliner like people do in the movies, but taking that chance would be a lot better than riding it into a mountain.
}:-)4
agreed..... see post # 38
Oh, it was something insidious, I'm certain. Not a rapid decompression.
I believe the whole idea of locking the cockpit was an over reaction.
Picture here.
}:-)4
If cabin door locked, how would passenger know the pilots were unconscious?
Btw, why so many little children?
How easy would it be for insidious to go undetected 'til it was too late? Especially after what happened tp Payne Stewart's flight. Has anything like this happened before on a big passenger jet?
I was thinking the same thing about frost.
Yep. That's what all the simulator time is for. No one really looks forward to it. It's work.
It could be something as simple as the pilots trying to work the problem and 1)not getting masks on and 2)not starting down.
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