Posted on 08/15/2005 6:48:15 AM PDT by dead
Accident investigators are probing why a Cypriot airliner slammed into a wooded hillside near Athens with the loss of more than 120 lives amid harrowing accounts of an apparent crisis in the plane's cockpit.
Two Greek air force F16 fighters scrambled to investigate after communications were suddenly lost with the Helios Airways twin-engine aircraft, Greek and Cypriot officials said.
The fighter pilots "saw two people in the cockpit - we don't know if they were crew members or passengers - appearing to want to take over the controls", said Greek government spokesman Theodore Roussopoulos.
They saw "the co-pilot slumped over and perhaps unconscious and the pilot not in his seat", he said, adding that the oxygen masks were "activated" in the cockpit.
The Greek government has initially ruled out a terrorist attack.
The plane was about to land at Athens airport for a stopover on its journey from Larnaca in Cyprus to the Czech capital Prague when it crashed at Varnava, a largely uninhabited area 40 km north-east of Athens, at 12:20 pm (1920 AEST).
According to the Greek private TV station Alpha, a passenger sent a text message to a cousin saying: "We're cold, the pilot is blue. We're going to die. Farewell."
But it was not clear whether the pilot had left the cockpit to enter the passenger cabin or whether the sender of the text message had been in the cockpit.
A senior official at the public order ministry, however, speculated that a sudden drop in cabin pressure could have caused the disaster.
The official said the pilot had mentioned a problem with the Boeing 737's air-conditioning system before losing contact.
But in Paris, accident investigator Francois Grangier told AFP that a sudden loss of pressurisation would not have caused the plane to crash, nor would it have made the pilots immediately lose consciousness.
The plane would have been at fairly low altitude as it approached Athens airport, and Grangier said loss of pressurisation would not have had any effect on the aircraft's structure.
He also said the pilots would have had their own oxygen supply.
Another expert said that in the case of sudden depressurisation because of structural damage, for example the blowing out of a window, the internal temperature would plummet and the plane would crash.
US investigators were on their way to Athens to help with the inquiry, as US law requires them to aid any probe into the loss of a US-made aircraft.
At the crash site, Greek police said there was no trace of survivors among the 115 passengers and six crew whose bodies were burned almost beyond recognition.
Helios representative George Dimitriou said most of the passengers were of Cypriot nationality and included "48 youths on their way to Prague", as well as some Greeks and a few other foreigners. One of the pilots was German, he said.
Another source put the total number on board at 124.
The flight and cockpit voice recorders have been found, a Greek defence ministry official told AFP on condition of anonymity.
Greek aviation officials said it was the country's worst air disaster since a 1974 terrorist bomb aboard a TWA Boeing 707 caused it to crash in the Ionian sea with the loss of 88 lives.
Helios Airways said it was "unclear" what caused the crash.
"All planes have problems from time to time without exception," said Helios managing director Demetrios Pantazis. "We can't say at this time what exactly happened," he said.
Helios also rejected any suggetion that the aircraft was less than airworthy, saying it has undergone a complete technical check before departure.
Helios Airways, established in 1999, is the first private airline in Cyprus. It had a fleet of four Boeing 737 jets and flies to London, Athens, Sofia in Bulgafia, Dublin and Strasbourg in France, among other destinations.
The airline was bought last year by Libra Holidays, a Cyprus-based tour operator.
Greece has declared a day of mourning for Tuesday, when flags will fly at half-mast and a three-minute silence will be observed in public buildings. Cyprus will observe three days of mourning.
AFP
If it were terrorism, the fellow sending the text message probably would have mentioned it. Sounds like a pressure failure...
How long does it take to write such a message on a cell phone- I find it a huge PITA to try to send messsages-
so....
Couldn't someone have taken the controls and flown to a lower altitude?
If you're used to it, it doesn't take long. Kinda like typing you get faster over time.
It's just a matter of time before the manufacturers get around to designing aircraft that can be landed remotely, without a pilot, in an emergency.
Yes. Terrifying, though. I don't even want to know what the passengers' last minutes were like.
A news report on the radio this morning said many of the passengers were "frozen solid" by the time of the crash, although I am highly suspicios of that report. How could they tell this so quickly, and after the plane had burned?
I don't know. I guess we'll get answers eventually.
suspocios = suspicious
My daughter is adept to the point of amazement. She can type out a flawless paragraph in seconds without even looking at her phone, complete with capitalization and punctuation.
I think they would have had to have battled some comic book supervillian for that to really be the case.
OK, but what caused the pressure failure? It's kind of like saying a fellow shot six times in the chest died of cardiac arrest; yes his heart failed, but that wasn't the real cause.
It would take a lot longer than they were in the air to freeze a human body solid. And for that matter, have it stay that frozen after returning to close to sea level and going through a fire.
I wonder how difficult it would be for a sleeper "maintenance tech" to slip cyanide into the plane's air supply?
Good question.
ATHENS (Reuters) - Most of the bodies recovered from the Cypriot plane that crashed into a mountain near Athens with 121 people on board were "frozen solid," a Greek Defense Ministry source said on Monday.
"Autopsy on passengers so far shows the bodies were frozen solid, including some whose skin was charred by flames from the crash," the source, with access to the investigation, told Reuters.
There were some reports saying that passengers may have attempted to do so.
If they supposedly passed out from lack of oxygen at altitude (as some have suggested), then why in the world did they apparently decend in the vacinity of the airport they were due to land at? Why didn't they just fly until they ran out of fuel like Payne Stewart's plane?
If there are 124 dead this time, it seems these officials are incapable of making a simple comparison.
True...
I thought the landing was practically the only part of a flight where you actually need the pilot. maybe we can have pilotless airplanes.
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