According to evidence obtained by the Guardian, these may have been the first lives claimed because of the worldwide decision to lock plane cockpit doors in the wake of the airborne terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001. But he was too late: the fuel ran out, the engines died, and the Boeing 737-300 dived into a Greek hillside on August 14 last year, killing all 121 people on board. As circling fighter planes watched, the 25-year-old steward, Andreas Prodromou, clutched an oxygen bottle and fought to handle the controls. It ended as a junior steward finally succeeded in breaking into the locked cockpit of the plane, where the two pilots sat unconscious. Helios Airways, a budget Cypriot airline, was replaced earlier this year by a new carrier called ajet.The story of the last hours of the passengers on Helios Airways flight HCY 522 is a strange and chilling one. All 115 passengers - all Greek Cypriots and Greeks - and six crew were killed in the crash. The aircraft was shadowed by Greek fighter jets before it crashed at Grammatiko, some 40 kilometres north of Athens. Helios Airways Flight 522 had been traveling from Larnaca, Cyprus, to Prague, Czech Republic, with a scheduled stop in Athens. The plane issued two mayday signals when the first engine flamed out and crashed 13 minutes later after the second engine flamed out, it said.Įarlier this year, Tsolakis said a flight attendant had wrestled with the controls for at least 10 minutes before the crash, in a failed effort to regain control of the airliner. "The F-16 pilot tried to attract his attention without success," the report found. The report did not say if any of the passengers had managed to put on the masks, but it found that at least one man without a mask was seen alive in the cockpit 14 minutes before the crash by the pilot of a Greek F-16 fighter jet that had been scrambled to intercept the airliner. Thereafter, there was no response to radio calls to the aircraft," the report said. "Several communications between the captain and the operations centre took place in the next eight minutes concerning the above problems and ended as the aircraft climbed through 8,800 metres. The captain contacted Helios's operations centre after takeoff and as the aircraft climbed though 4,900 metres, reporting that there were warnings going off in the cabin, according to the report. The report said latent causes included Helios's "deficiencies in the organization, quality management, and safety culture" and the regulatory authority's "inadequate execution of its safety oversight responsibilities" over time. Maintenance officials in Cyprus were also indirectly blamed, along with Cypriot civil aviation authorities. The plane flew on autopilot for two hours until it ran out of fuel and crashed. That led to the "incapacitation of the flight crew due to hypoxia," or lack of oxygen. It also said the direct cause of the crash was the crew's failure to recognize that the plane's pressurization switch was in the "manual position" before takeoff and not set to automatic - which would have allowed the cabin to pressurize by itself.Īfter takeoff whenthe plane failed to pressurize, the two pilots did not recognize "the warnings and the reasons for the activation of the warnings," including one showing that the oxygen masks dropped. The report was prepared by Akrivos Tsolakis, head of Greece's National Aviation Safety Board. Maintenance officials left pressure controls on an incorrect setting, the report said, and the aircraft's manufacturer, Boeing, was cited for "ineffectiveness of measures taken in response to previous pressurization incidents in the particular type of aircraft." The two pilots of the Cypriot 737-300 failed to competently operate controls regulating cabin pressure and misinterpreted a subsequent warning, which eventually led to the crew passing out and the jetliner's crashnorth of the Greek capital, according to a report delivered to Greece's transport minister. 14, 2005, the deadliest air disaster in the history of Greece and Cyprus. Investigators cited human error Tuesday as the main cause of the Helios Airways crash that killed all 121 passengers and crew near Athens on Aug.
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