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Europe
Cabin staff struggled to control crash plane
2005-08-17
EFL: The cabin crew of the Helios Airlines plane that crashed in Greece on Sunday tried to bring it under control but could do nothing to save the aircraft, it was disclosed yesterday. Video footage retrieved from the nose cones of the F16 fighter planes scrambled to accompany the stricken Cypriot aircraft showed a man and a woman enter the cockpit, said Greek media reports. They were thought to be a newly-trained pilot standing in as cabin crew and his stewardess girlfriend. The stewardess was seen in the captain's seat, while the first officer remained unconscious in the right-hand seat. The couple wrestled in vain with the controls of the Boeing 737, Greek military sources said.
Didn't know how to turn off auto-pilot
. All 121 passengers and crew died when the plane plunged into a hillside north of Athens during a flight from Larnaca. Autopsies on 26 bodies, including the co-pilot, showed they were alive but not necessarily conscious when the plane went down. Earlier reports suggested that all on board may have frozen to death before the crash.

Cypriot television said many of the bodies retrieved were still wearing oxygen masks. Once the masks had been released, prompted by a drop in pressure, the cabin crew would have expected the plane to descend immediately from 34,00 ft to a breathable altitude below 15,000 ft. Aviation experts believe that when this failed to happen cabin staff entered the cockpit, aware that the flight crew's emergency oxygen supply was limited. But with the pilots incapacitated the attendants lacked the skill to fly the airliner or even to make a mayday call.

Experts said that by this stage the jet would have been beyond the range of the Cyprus control centre in Nicosia - the last frequency tuned on the radio. Even if the cabin crew had been familiar with the radio they were unlikely to have known how to tune either to Athens control or international emergency. Back in the cabin, the passengers' oxygen supply was dwindling.

Helios Airways admitted yesterday that the crashed aircraft had experienced a decompression problem in the past. A statement on the airline's website said the incident occurred on a flight from Warsaw to Larnaca last December and the plane "landed in accordance with normal procedures". Helios went on to say that the incident was cleared at the time by the Cypriot air accident investigators and Britain's Civil Aviation Authority, which did not question the aircraft's maintenance.

The authorities at Birmingham International Airport, meanwhile, said that a day before the crash in Greece another Helios Airways Boeing 737 had reported difficulties with its wing flaps. Emergency services were deployed but the plane landed safely.
Next time I fly in Europe it's Lufthansa all the way.
A Greek man was yesterday charged with disseminating false information after police said he falsely claimed to have received a text message from a passenger before Sunday's crash. Nektarios Voutas, 32, said he had received a mobile phone call and changed the wording of the supposed text in different media interviews. His arraignment was delayed after he tripped outside the public prosecutor's office and had to be treated for face injuries in hospital.
"tripped", is that Greek for "beaten"?
Greek aviation officials yesterday expressed doubts over whether the crash aircraft's black box voice recorder would be recovered. Capt Akrivos Tsolakis, the head of the Air Accident Investigation and Aviation Safety Board, said that only the cover of the recorder had been retrieved. This was badly damaged, so it was unlikely that the contents, if found, could reveal much about the flight's last moments. In Cyprus, demands for explanations for the accident from grieving relatives were becoming louder.
Posted by:Steve

#18  ...do you think it was shot down?

What I think changes as info comes in. There'll be more still.
Posted by: Angie Schultz   2005-08-17 18:57  

#17  Angie,


As tz has mentioned the O2 for all the passengers can't be replaced, but do you think it was shot down?
Posted by: Poison Reverse   2005-08-17 18:47  

#16  For those who just can't get enough of this story, here's the PPruNe (Professional Pilots' Rumor Network) page. Latest information is at the bottom, so you'll want to go to the last page (currently 34!). They point to this article from Der Spiegel, which I can't read (Babelfish is just terrible for German), but apparently there's mention of someone trying to gain control of the aircraft, and a piccy of the flight attendant couple.
Posted by: Angie Schultz   2005-08-17 18:37  

#15  tz,

Got it.
Posted by: Poison Reverse   2005-08-17 18:11  

#14  Each seat has it's own O2 generator about the size of a Coke can. Replacing 130+ of them would be a time consuming and highly technical task.
Posted by: tzsenator   2005-08-17 18:09  

#13  tz,

I agree with your statement about O2 distribution. But, I'm thinking something more sinister. What if the O2 canister for the passengers was replaced on the ground with a diffrent mixture? Afterall, were are talking about Cyprus here. Anything can be bought for money.

Angie,

I don't buy the "fuel running out" story. This is Defense Ministry spin. It's a relatively short distance from Cyprus to Greece. I believe it was shot down, until I hear convincing proof otherwise.
Posted by: Poison Reverse   2005-08-17 18:02  

#12  Damn, this thing just gets weirder and weirder.
Posted by: Laurence of the Rats   2005-08-17 17:48  

#11  Well, here's more:

The F-16 pilots reported seeing someone in the cockpit -- probably a man -- take control of the plane as [it] flew in a gradually descending holding pattern, apparently on autopilot, at about 37,000 feet near Athens airport.

That person then banked the plane away from Athens, lowering it first to 2,000 feet and then climbing back up to 7,000 feet before the plane apparently ran out of fuel and crashed, state-run NET television reported, quoting unnamed Defense Ministry sources.

See my comment above regarding fuel.
Posted by: Angie Schultz   2005-08-17 17:36  

#10  The crew O2 system is independent of the passenger system. 2 high pressure cylinders supply the pilots while the passengers rely on oxygen candles in the event of a decompression at altitude. A cabin pressure switch deploys the masks when cabin altitude exceeds limits. Extending the mask to its full extent pulls a lanyard, firing a precussion cap and igniting the O2 generator. This makes it virtualy impossible to poison the passengers with supplemental O2.
Posted by: tzsenator   2005-08-17 17:24  

#9  From my analysis, the pilot(s) were killed by the "newly-trained" pilot and stewardess, the passengers rendered unconscious by the oxygen gas and the Greek Air Force saw the threat of a suicide pilot had no choice but to shoot it down.
Posted by: Poison Reverse   2005-08-17 16:55  

#8  Are you saying that moving the control column will disengage the autopilot? If so (and I have sat next to the pilot on a number of occasions and I recall it is that simple), then why did it apparently stay on autopilot for so long, with people in the cockpit trying to 'control' the aircraft? And I wonder what those toxicology reports say?
Posted by: phil_b   2005-08-17 16:28  

#7  Force transducers in either contol yoke would have kicked off the autopilot had someone moved them. The flight management system system feeds the autopilot lateral and vertical nav info that was programed by the crew during preflight. So the aircraft would have continued on its own until it reached the last programed waypoint.
Posted by: tzsenator   2005-08-17 15:49  

#6  OK, so the autopilot's flying the plane to Athens, cruising along at 35000 feet. The plane gets to Athens, but no one turns off the autopilot. What happens?

1) It just keeps going on the same heading.
2) It circles at 35000 until it gets new instructions.
3) It descends to mountain height and circles until it gets new instructions.

See, 'cause I can't figure out how a plane under autopilot at 35000 feet is going to crash into a mountain, given that there are no 35000 ft mountains. Someone suggested that it circled until it ran out of fuel, but the plane crashed minutes before it was due to land in Athens. It must have had enough fuel to reach Athens; that was the first stop.

So the only way it could crash, assuming it was still obeying the autopilot, was if the autopilot was programmed to descend to 7000, or wherever the mountains are. That seems kinda dodgy to me, but I don't know how autopilots work. Maybe I'm missing something.
Posted by: Angie Schultz   2005-08-17 15:34  

#5  There are two problems with this scenario (apart from the lack of radio communication). One is, if the plane decompressed, then after 2 hours everyone without access to oxygen should be dead, yet every person autopsied so far was alive. The other is, the timeline for the attendants trying to gain control of the plane is wrong. They were observed at least an hour after whatever event occured. What were they doing for that time and why weren't they incapacitated? Occam's Razor still says an attempted terrorist hijacking.
Posted by: phil_b   2005-08-17 14:47  

#4  2b: that's an interesting analysis. Hmmm.
Posted by: Steve White   2005-08-17 14:44  

#3  Dang, hit "submit" too soon. I wonder how long all this went on? Some folks here were saying cabin oxygen is only meant to last for a few minutes, but this plane was acting suspiciously for two hours.

This just in: Hoax Boy gets six months, suspended. Also, co-pilot's son says his father always kept diaries of his flights, and : "He told me that if his diary was published then the company would close."
Posted by: Angie Schultz   2005-08-17 13:10  

#2  We are to believe that the plane is set up so that the cock-pit will run out of oxygen before the cabin?

Soooo...the newly-trained pilot standing in as cabin crew (AND his stewardess girlfriend) can move freely about even after the pilots have conked out AND they don't know how to make a mayday call or turn off the auto pilot. yeah right.

So exactly where did this "newly trained pilot" get his flight training?
Posted by: 2b   2005-08-17 13:03  

#1  "tripped", is that Greek for "beaten"?

From yesterday (scroll down for picture): one nasty cut over the eye, otherwise undamaged. Might've tripped while his hands were cuffed behind him.
Posted by: Angie Schultz   2005-08-17 13:03  

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