Grasshopper Green

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe...ash/index.html

ATHENS, Greece (CNN) -- A Cypriot plane with "no sign of life" in its cockpit while approaching Athens crashed into a mountain on Sunday, Greek officials said. They said all 121 people aboard died.

F-16 pilots escorting the jet after air traffic controllers lost contact with it said one of the pilots was not in its cockpit and another was slumped over the controls, according to reports.

The pilots of the Helios Airways Boeing 737 had reported an air conditioning problem, and Greek TV said a passenger sent a text message to his cousin saying it was freezing in the plane.

"The pilot has turned blue (in the face)," the passenger said in the SMS message, Reuters quoted the television report as saying. "Cousin farewell we're freezing."

The plane, Helios Flight 522 with 115 passengers and six crew en route from Larnaca, Cyprus, to Athens, crashed about 12 p.m. Sunday (0900 GMT, 5 a.m. ET), officials said.

The Greek government said there were no survivors.

The plane was supposed to continue to Prague, Czech Republic, after landing in Athens, according to the Czech Press Agency, citing officials at the Prague airport.

The passengers included 59 adults and eight children who were disembarking at Athens for a vacation, the government said, along with 46 adults and two children who were headed to Prague.

Akrivos Tsolakis, head of the Greek airline safety committee, called the crash the "worst accident we've ever had," The Associated Press reported.

Officials said the plane's voice and data recorders had been recovered and were sent to Athens for analysis.

Greek officials said they suspect malfunctions in the oxygen supply or pressurization system could have caused the crash.

A spokesman for the Greek joint chiefs of staff said that terrorism does not appear the likely cause.

"No scenario can be ruled out, but the likelihood of terrorism is diminished" because the F-16 jets that investigated saw no need to shoot down the planes, said Gerasimos Kalpoyiannakis.

A Cyprus government spokesman said all the passengers were Cypriots. Vicky Xites, commercial manager for Helios Airways, told CNN the airline had set up a command center at Larnaca Airport and that the prime minister was on his way.

Greek ministers broke off their holidays to return to Athens for emergency meetings.

The jet crashed near the coastal town of Grammatikos, about 40 km (25 miles) north of Athens and near the historic town of Marathon.

The crash site was littered with bodies and debris, Athens journalist Paul Anastasi told CNN. Video footage from the site showed the smoking wreckage of the aircraft. Only the tail portion remained identifiable.

The crash sparked forest fires, which officials said were hindering recovery efforts.

"There is wreckage everywhere," Grammatikos Mayor George Papageorgiou told AP from the scene.

"The fuselage has been destroyed. It fell into a chasm and there are pieces. All the residents are here trying to help."

One witness told Reuters: "I saw many bodies scattered around, all of them wearing (oxygen) masks. The tail was cut off and the remaining parts of the plane rolled down a hillside about 500 metres away from the tail."

The jet entered Greek air space about 10:30 a.m., but efforts by air traffic controllers to contact the pilots were futile. After some time, two Greek F-16s were scrambled, Greek Air Force spokesman Yiannis Papageorgiou told CNN.

As the F-16s approached, their pilots saw "no sign of life" in the cockpit, and the plane apparently was on autopilot, Papageorgiou said.

The F-16 pilots reported that one of the pilots was not in the cockpit, and the other pilot was slumped over the controls, Anastasi said.

They also reported they could see through the plane's windows that the oxygen masks had dropped down.

The F-16s escorted the plane until it struck the mountain. The Greek Defense Ministry has denied reports that the F-16s shot down the plane.

"Although there are precedents for both pilots losing consciousness at the controls of aircraft in the past, for it to happen on a large airliner like a Boeing 737, with all the backup systems they have there, does seem to be really quite extraordinary," said Kieran Daly, editor of Air Transport Intelligence.

"It really is all very peculiar at the moment, I rather suspect we're heading for a very complicated investigation," he said.

A lack of oxygen apparently caused the crash that killed golfer Payne Stewart in the U.S. state of South Dakota in 1999.

Stewart's twin-engine jet went down in a pasture after flying halfway across the country on autopilot, as Stewart and the four others aboard apparently lay unconscious for lack of oxygen after the plane lost cabin pressure. Everyone was killed.

In Greece, witness Dimitris Karezas, who owns a summer camp in the area of Sunday's crash, told Reuters, "I saw the plane coming. I knew it was serious or that it was some kind of VIP because I saw the two fighter jets.

"Two, three minutes later I heard a big bang and ever since I've started looking for it, but I have not found anything yet," he told reporters.

A spokeswoman for the Czech Airport Authority, Anna Kovarikova, told Reuters the flight had been due to land in Prague at 1:10 p.m. (1110 GMT).

At the Prague airport, where friends and relatives were gathering to meet the flight, screens showing departures and arrivals read simply "delayed" next to the stricken flight.

Helios Airlines is a subsidiary of Libra Holidays Group, which specializes in travel packages to Greece and Cyprus.

This weekend marks the Greek Orthodox holiday of the Assumption of the Virgin, a peak travel time.

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I really don't understand what decompression is, but the thought that it would make the pilots lose consciousness like that is scary. One more reason to dislike flying.

My thoughts are with the families that had relatives on the flight.

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Schwan

This has to be the creepiest air accident of the year. Latest reports mention frozen bodies on the ground (Greece is, AFAIK, a rather hot place this time of year...). Also, it's reported that 80 of the passengers were kids. Ugh.

maleficent

A lot of the passengers being kids, I can understand because it was during one of their holiday times, so it was probably families taking kids on vacation.

As for frozen bodies, it's possible that the plane decompressed at a high altitude (which would explain why they died from lack of oxygen) it's also pretty damn cold at that altitude, once the plane decompresses, then the cabin temperature would drop dramatically.

I thought... and this is from reading the emergency pamphlets on the planes... that if the plane decompressed for whatever reason, the oxygen masks came down automatically, in both the cockpit and the main cabin.

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Schwan

What I was hinting at with the frozen bodies - as gruesome as it is - is that they must have been REALLY frozen, because it's very, very hot on the ground these days (not to mention... aah, never mind). From what I gather so far, there's very little time during decompression to put on an oxygen mask - something along the lines of a few seconds. Also, this was a Cyprian plane. These are not the best airways to be flying on. The maintenance sucks and it's not nearly as save as flying on a major carrier.

Pragma

On a recent flight, they had the outside temperature displayed in the video screens. At cruising altitude (about 40,000ft above the Atlantic Ocean), the outside temperature was about -30 degrees Fahrenheit, if not colder. Now, Greece is a good deal to the south of where I was, but at that altitude, the air temperature is very low due to the thin air. Should the plane decompress and be exposed to that temperature, it would kill people fairly quickly and freeze the bodies.

Peat

I'm wondering why the passangers couldnt do anything to try and avoid the collision. I know that it could be that they were all suposedly unconcious at the time, but then how do you explain the last second txt messages?. I guess I would like to think that I would try to do something, although this is from someone who could never imagin what it would really be like. But all in all this is still a tragety that hopefully we can learn something from. Also we can only hope that the lack of oxygen gave them a more humain passing away (as humain as this tragety is anyway).

maleficent

I thought a lot was learned when Payne Stewart was killed in a very similar way... too bad nothing was gained from that accident....

Is there any kind of time frame from the last text message to the crash? I know Payne's plane flew for a while with them unconscious before it crashed. Perhaps in this case, the cockpit might have decompressed first, then it took it longer for the rest of the plane to get into the same state?

Black boxes will hopefully give some info.

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meembo

The frozen body thing freaks me out. It suggests everybody was dead for quite a while. On a 737? That's hard to imagine. At least it hit a mountain, and not a city. I wonder if the Greeks were contemplating shooting it down.

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Frozen North

This is an incredibly weird accident. When a plane loses pressure at high elevation, the pilots are supposed to rapidly descend to an elevation where the outside air is thick enough to breathe since those little drop-down oxygen masks the passengers use only last a couple minutes. Apparently these pilots didn't manually descend since the plane was supposedly on autopilot when it crashed... and one of the pilots wasn't even in the cockpit?

meembo

I was just reading a NYT article that reports the Greek fighter pilots escorting the plane for 45 minutes saw a couple people, perhaps crew members, trying to control the aircraft -- but it doesn't say how long this was before the crash. A stewardess' body was found in the cockpit area. All but two of the bodies have been recovered, and I guess they were all frozen solid.

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Lasereth

Wow, that's pretty creepy. I'd like to know exactly what happened.

-Lasereth

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lindalove

Here's a creepy image for you all. The two Jets scrambled to the plane to check it out saw the pilot 'slumped over', but then much have also been able to see the people right the way along the plane. They escorted it until it crashed.

Rlyss

I'm curious as to how the guy who sent the text message about the pilot being blue knew this. Aren't the doors to the cockpit locked, or is that not really true on such small airlines? (I read somewhere that Helios airlines has only 4 planes.) Perhaps the other pilot left the cockpit to inform the passengers about what was going on. Wouldn't he have used the intercom? Maybe the passengers were frozen before the cockpit was. But then the people wouldn't have been able to get to the cockpit to try and steer the plane. If the fighter pilots to look into the cockpit through the windows to see a pilot slumped over and someone trying to control the plane then it's hard to believe it could have been so cold and such a lack of air - the people would only last a few seconds they say, hardly enough to have the jet fighters in the air, alongside the plane, AND have passengers up from their seats and into the cockpit messing with the controls.

You're right about this being creepy - every question I think of only leads to more.

Redlemon

I think (read: hope) that a sudden drop in oxygen levels killed the people before the cold froze them. I think it would be a quicker way to die.

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Schwan

More interesting news coming. This particular airplane flew between Cyprus, Greece and Central Europe. On a recent flight to (or from) Warsaw, there was a serious AC malfunction. Reports mentioned that people who got off the plane were compltely dazed and confused, if you will.

Ronin Tetsuro

This whole thing gets stranger and stranger.

As a note of clarification, te text message wasn't send seconds before the crash, it was sent earlier on in the flight, when theorietically the passengers would have still been coherent.

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meembo

Police arrested a man (the only man? - I don't know) who claimed to have received a text message. They determined the man was lying and charged him with filing a false police report.

From CNN:

Meanwhile Monday, police in northern Greece said they had arrested a man who said he had received a telephone text message from a passenger on board the doomed plane, according to AP.

Police said the man was Nektarios-Sotirios Voutas, 32, who had told Greek TV stations Sunday his cousin texted him minutes before the crash saying: "Farewell, cousin, here we're frozen."

Authorities said they believed the man was lying, and his cousin's name was not on the Cypriot government's official list of victims.

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maleficent

Crash police raid airline offices
ATHENS, Greece (CNN) -- Police in Cyprus have raided the offices of Helios Airways, officials said, a day after one of the company's jets crashed in Greece, killing all 121 people on board.

Six people who died in the crash were alive when the plane crashed, chief Athens coroner Fillipos Koutsaftis said Monday. It remained unclear whether they were conscious, he said.

"We have performed autopsies on six people. Our conclusion is they had circulation and were breathing at the time of death," Koutsaftis said.

As investigators tried to establish the cause of the crash, a Greek Cypriot government spokeswoman told CNN Monday that prosecutors felt insufficient information had been surrendered by the airline and ordered police to take further documents.

Among the things police were searching for were maintenance records about the plane involved in the crash.

Some news reports have said the plane was serviced for air conditioning trouble in the past.

Yiannis Papageorgiou, a spokesman for the Greek Air Force, said authorities were investigating whether that could have been related to the crash.

The two Helios pilots had reported an air conditioning problem shortly after leaving Larnaca, according to the Czech Press Agency.

Investigators at the crash site in Grammatiko pieced through the charred wreckage Monday, but reported no clues as to what had gone wrong.

"The plane observed all the necessary maintenance and checks in line with international requirements, those of the construction firm, and Cypriot civil aviation requirements," said Andreas Drakos, president of the Cypriot airline Helios Airways, in a news conference before the airline's offices were raided.

"Before the plane left, it had completely undergone all checks according to the regulations."

Helios had no immediate response to the raid.

A team of Americans from Boeing -- the company that made the 737 aircraft -- headed to the region as well to take part in the investigation.

Though the flight data and voice recorders could provide some clues, investigators said the voice recorder was badly damaged. It remained unclear how much sound would be audible. Both so-called "black boxes" -- in this case, actually orange boxes -- were taken away by investigators.

A central question is whether the passengers and crew were alive, or perhaps unconscious, before the plane slammed into a mountain.

When Helios Flight 522 from Larnaca, Cyprus, to Prague, Czech Republic, with a scheduled stop in Athens, first crossed into Greek airspace and failed to respond to communications attempts, two Greek fighter jets were sent to intercept it.

The plane was on autopilot at 35,000 feet. The pilots of the F-16s reported seeing one of the pilots slumped over its controls, but did not see the other pilot. They saw two people who they thought were crew members trying to prevent the plane from crashing, a government spokesman said.

The body of a female flight attendant was found in the wreckage of the cockpit, the spokesman said.

The fighter pilots also said they could see through the cabin windows that the oxygen masks had dropped from the ceiling of the plane, and witnesses at the crash site reported that some passengers' faces still had oxygen masks attached.

The plane was about 25 miles east of Athens when it crashed shortly after 12 p.m. (5 a.m. ET) Sunday on the island of Euboea, sparking forest fires that hindered initial recovery efforts.

Investigators are looking into whether the plane had experienced a catastrophic loss of air pressure.

"The first indications in Cyprus and in Greece are that this was not caused by a terrorist act," said Marios Karoyian, a presidential spokesman in Cyprus.

A Cyprus government spokesman said all 121 people aboard, including six crew members, were Cypriots.

Deputy Interior Minster Marko Yannakis said Monday 119 bodies were recovered, and searchers were looking for remains of two others.

Flights arrived in Greece Monday carrying family members from Cyprus. They were asked to help identify bodies at a makeshift morgue.

"I want those responsible to be punished," said Anastasios Doulas, who lost her daughter-in-law and three grandchildren. Speaking angrily through tears, she said, "Those responsible have created a flying death-trap. Didn't they see the problem? I want them to be severely punished."

Cyprus declared three days of mourning for the victims. In Athens, Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis took part in a ceremony honoring the dead.

The crash took place during Greek Orthodox holiday of the Assumption of the Virgin, a peak travel time. Helios is a subsidiary of Libra Holidays Group, which specializes in travel packages to Greece and Cyprus.

Meanwhile Monday, police in northern Greece said they had arrested a man who said he had received a telephone text message from a passenger on board the doomed plane, according to AP.

Police said the man was Nektarios-Sotirios Voutas, 32, who had told Greek TV stations Sunday his cousin texted him minutes before the crash saying: "Farewell, cousin, here we're frozen."

Authorities said they believed the man was lying, and his cousin's name was not on the Cypriot government's official list of victims.

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How could six people be alive and the rest frozen?

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Schwan

The freezing part is very strange indeed. How cold would it have to be for a human body to freeze in an hour?

analog

Actually, you could take several very painful minutes to die from lack of oxygen, it's the same feeling as drowning, if not more painful, because there's no water. Freezing at that temperature would kill you pretty quickly, and totally numb you before you went. I'm hoping they froze quickly. It's way better than having no air.

Martian

In the case of sudden decompression, the loss of oxygen would almost certainly be the cause of death. What's interesting though, is that some of the passengers were alive at the time of the crash, which if the plane was flying out of control for 45 minutes prior shouldn't be possible. I'm suspecting that rather than a loss of pressure, the environmental controls failed, causing a drop in temperature inside the aircraft. Or possibly the A/C system leaked coolant into the cabin? In the event of a complete HVAC failure, those inside the aircraft would be at the mercy of outside temperatures, but the pilot should have realized what was going on in that case and dropped down to a lower altitude to compensate, prior to an emergency landing.

Also, the crew apparently tried to control the plane but was unsuccessful, which makes me think there was something else going on. As someone who has actually flown a plane before I will say that it's relatively easy to fly; it's the takeoffs and landings that are difficult. So the question is, why the loss of control? Perhaps a simultaneous failure of the hydraulics system?

I guess the FDR will shed some insight into this, at least for the Boeing techs. The VCR is really the less important of the two in a situation like this, where it seems mechanical failure is likely.

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maleficent

Do we believe in threes? First the plane in Toronto, then the plane in greece, now the plane in Venezuela...

Report: Airliner crashes in western Venezuela

CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- A passenger plane crashed in remote western Venezuela with 152 passengers aboard early Tuesday, an aviation official said. It was unclear whether anyone survived.

The West Caribbean Airways plane was headed from Panama to Martinique in the Caribbean when its pilot reported engine trouble to the Caracas airport, said Francisco Paz, president of the National Aviation Institute.

Airport authorities lost radio contact with the plane later in the area of Machiques, in the western state of Zulia, he said.

"Residents in the area said they heard an explosion," Paz said. "Air rescue teams are traveling to the area right now by air and by land."

He said the pilot reported trouble with both engines to the Caracas air control tower just after 3 a.m. ET, and authorities lost contact with the plane roughly 10 minutes later.

The plane had been chartered for tourists, and 152 passengers were listed on the flight plan, Paz said. It wasn't immediately clear how many crew members accompanied them.

The plane was believed to have gone down between two farms in the remote zone.

West Caribbean Airways, a Colombian airline, began service in 1998.

In March, a twin-engine plane operated by the same airline crashed during takeoff from the Colombian island of Old Providence, killing eight people and injuring the other six passengers.

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Rlyss

What if the plane's on autopilot though? How easy is it to take it off that and put it back in human control? I wonder if there's just a big button that says 'Autopilot On/Off', or if you just have to turn the steering wheel/stick and it kicks in (like the brake with cruise control) or if it's a combination of buttons.

Redjake

An update:

The Text message thing was a hoax, didn't actually happen.

They picked 20 bodies to autopsy, and all 20 showed signs of being alive when the plane actually crashed (hints towards no one being "frozen to death")

The pilot in the cockpit was *alive* when the plane crashed


http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe...ash/index.html

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maleficent

From all the Airport disaster movies I've watched over the years, autopilot is just a knob that is pulled or pushed... (George Kennedy would tell you it was easy, sweetheart

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Lwang9276

hmm this is strange and interesting, cuz since the message was supposedly a hoax then that means noone was frozen, but i believe i read that some were frozen, if they were frozen how did the guy know they were frozen if his text message was fake? (or was there like time delay before he told the world of text msg?) So now if it is fake, wtf happened? Cmon black/orange boxes reveal the truth!

Elphaba

Which releases the blow-up pilot, right? I smell a conspiracy.

joemc91

Cold itself wouldn't have caused everyone to pass out and the plane to go out of control. They mentioned decompression, so that's more likely. There are no drop down masks in the front, but there are masks meant to be put on within 5 seconds in case of this. Of course, if you're not ready for it, count a few seconds to realize what's happening, a few more to put down that magazine you're reading, then more than 5 to put the damn thing on because it's so awkward and you haven't done it since training 8 months ago. With only 10 seconds of useful consciousness up there, I could see where everybody just conks out. Same thing happened in the Payne Stewart crash.

About the autopilot, there are a bunch of ways to disconnect it, the big A/P button on the pedestal. Move any of the 3 trim wheels, push or turn the yoke really hard, press the big red button on the yoke.

I won't speculate at all, but that's just what we're trained to do with the oxygen masks up front.

JumpinJesus

Seeing this creeps me out for the reason that shesus flew a couple weeks ago and on her flight back to Chicago, she complained about the temperature in the plane because the A/C was not working. A few days later, this happens.

Like a lot of you, I certainly hope that whatever the circumstances, I hope the passengers were at least unconscious when the plane crashed.

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maleficent

Cypriot crash baffles authorities
this one just gets stranger and stranger...

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maleficent

Mayday call from doomed jet
this sounds more and more like a bad hollywood disaster movie... only it's real... (anyone remember the Airport movies from the 70s? )

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