The pilots of two Greek air force F-16 fighter planes scrambled to intercept the plane after it lost contact with air traffic control shortly after entering Greek airspace said they saw the co-pilot slumped over the controls. Investigators also were trying to determine why the pilot was not in his seat shortly before the crash. “It’s in a bad state and, possibly, it won’t give us the information we need,” he said. experts, were sending the plane’s data and cockpit voice recorders to France for expert examinations that could shed light on what happened.īut the head of the Greek airline safety committee, Akrivos Tsolakis, said the voice recorder was damaged. In Larnaca, the Cypriot city where the flight took off, police raided the offices of Helios Airlines, seeking “evidence which could be useful for the investigation into possible criminal acts,” said Cypriot deputy presidential spokesman Marios Karoyian. Greek and Cypriot officials have ruled out terrorism as a cause of the crash. “It’s a very rare event to even have a pressurization problem and in general crews are very well trained to deal with it.”Īthens’ chief coroner, Fillipos Koutsaftis, said he could not determine whether the six people whose bodies were examined were conscious when the Helios Airways Boeing 737-300 plunged 34,000 feet into a mountainous area near the village of Grammatiko, 25 miles north of Athens. “It’s odd,” said Terry McVenes, executive air safety chairman for the Air Line Pilots Association, International. The pilot was not in his seat when the plane crashed, about 21/2 hours after the crew first radioed in air conditioning problems. Death would be minutes behind.īut two fighter jet pilots who scrambled to intercept the plane saw the co-pilot slumped over, oxygen masks in the plane dangling, and two unidentified people trying to take control of the plane. In that case, passengers and flight crew would have had only seconds to put on oxygen masks before losing consciousness amid subzero temperatures. Greek aviation officials have said the plane apparently lost pressure suddenly, causing a rapid loss of oxygen on board. But they failed to answer all the questions. The results of the first six autopsies shed some light on the final minutes of Helios Airlines Flight ZU522, which crashed Sunday into a hillside in suburban Athens, killing all 115 passengers and six crew members. ATHENS, Greece - At least six of the 121 people aboard a Cypriot plane were alive when the aircraft crashed while on autopilot, a coroner said Monday, as authorities raided the airline’s offices and tried to explain the actions of the pilot and crew.
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