Posted on 08/14/2005 5:57:11 AM PDT by Excuse_My_Bellicosity
Shoe bomber. (?)
Don't bother me. For I below to somebody?
The 'black boxes' were recovered though there is a report that the CVR (cockpit voice recorder) was heavily damaged. The CVR usually provides only the final thirty minutes so it would be of little use and most crashes result in more information being obtained from background noises on the CVR than actual cockpit conversation anyway.
The "poison gas" was an unfortunate term to have been used. Perhaps they meant toxic. Such as carbon monoxide. An insidious systemic 'poison'.
Actually, cabin pressurization is provided by bleed air from the engine compressor and it is rare for there to be any sort of fumes unless the engine has recently been started. The bleed air must first be cooled then sent to the air conditioner system and then to the cabin so fumes from jet fuel rarely reach the cabin in any great quantity and certainly not long after takeoff.
Alot of airlines 'skimp' on cabin pressure because use of bleed air means increased fuel costs.
If oxygen masks drop, some passengers hesitate too long. The rule is, even if the plane is sitting on the ground and you KNOW, absolutely KNOW, that you don't need oxygen because you are at sea level and have not even taken off yet, if the masks drop, get them on and do it FAST.
Thats why you put YOUR mask on first and then aid a child you are traveling with. There is no time to aid the child first.
Now it does not look like there was any explosive decompression and the military pilots did not report the sighting of dropped oxygen masks but they made no comments about the interior of the cabin anyway.
My first question would be when was the last engine maintenance? How many flights since then?
Moving about the cabin would undoubtedly have been with the aid of the 'extra' mask at the aisle. Some knowledgable passenger may have tried to help but probably couldn't get into the cockpit in time.
Bodies from the crash site were FROZEN. All of them.
More info pointing away from decompression
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-greece-crash-theories,0,5234136.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines
"Chief Athens coroner Fillipos Koutsaftis said Monday that tests conducted on the remains showed that at least six victims were alive at the time of the crash."
"Some media have reported that the victims froze in their seats before the crash, but Greek officials said the bodies were not cold when they were found."
"Bill Waldock, an aviation safety professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona, said one clue to a sudden pressure loss would have been frost on the windows because it's so cold at 34,000 feet. If the fighter pilots could see into the cockpit, the windows could not have been iced over, he said."
Could there have been localized damage to the cockpit?
http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=541
August 14, 2005, 3:18 PM (GMT+02:00)
Why was no lunch served aboard Helios airliner before it crashed? At what point were crew and passengers overcome?
This is one of the key questions asked by investigators led by Akrivos Tsolakis of the transport ministry in Athens into the causes of the Cypriot plane’s crash north of Athens en route from Larnaca to Prague. Cyprus and Greece are observing three days of mourning for the 121 victims who died in the disaster.
Another question relates to the two mystery people reportedly observed in the cockpit at moment of the communications break-off between the airliner and Larnaca control tower early in the fatal flight. Were they passengers trying to save the plane after the pilots were incapacitated? Or possibly hijackers making sure the plane would not survive the flight?
The passenger list as released by the Cypriot police includes 103 Greek-Cypriot nationals, many of Armenian origin, and 12 Greeks. The pilot was German and the rest of the crew Greek. Most are presumed Christians, but Muslims who form 18% of the Cypriot population may have been among them. That is the third key question whose answer awaits identification of all the bodies, some by
DNA testing which takes 10 days for results.
Helios president Andreas Drakos admitted that a depressurization problem had occurred on a Boeing 737 Warsaw-Larnaca flight last December but stressed that the plane had been checked by the British authorities in London and the manufacturers and declared airworthy.
According to the evidence of the Greek coroner, 12 of the victims were alive when the Boeing came down but may have fainted.
A former Helios engineer Kyriakos Pilavakis told the investigation that loss of cabin oxygen is a common event. He said the pilots had a big tank full of oxygen under their seats. It was not connected to the passengers’ supply. Pilavakis did not believe the disaster was caused by decompression.
The investigators have still to question the two Greek air force F-16 pilots on their visual impressions of the doomed plane just before it crashed into a mountain north of Athens. They earlier reported they saw one pilot slumped in his seat and the second absent, and oxygen masks dangling over the motionless passengers.
The flight recorders may answer some puzzling questions which prompted the Greek army chief to say a terrorist hijacking cannot ruled out and which sent Mediterranean airports on hijack alert. The fragmentation of the plane into small bits of widely scattered debris suggests a possible explosion.
Unfortunately news reports will never differentiate properly between hypoxia and hypoxemia or the subsequent anoxia and anoxemia, but it should be remembered that all airlines personnel are well trained to get those masks on INSTANTLY and its only the passengers who are lulled by the repeated but low key briefings.
However, the decompression may not have been explosive and it might even be that the cabin was never properly pressurized. It the decompression were gradual rather than explosive alarm systems might not react. I don't know.
Most of the passengers who suffered hypoxia would still have been alive upon impact.
The 'scatter pattern' does not reflect an in-flight explosion of any sort. The plane 'cratered'.
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