Athens, Greece – A Cypriot passenger plane with 121 people on board crashed Sunday just north of the Greek capital, after being shadowed for 43 helpless minutes by fighter jets reporting that the co-pilot was slumped over the controls and that there was no sign of the pilot.
Two Greek fighter pilots, peering into the plane, saw “a lifeless cockpit,” according to a Greek air force spokesman, even though the Helios Air Boeing 737 continued flying, apparently on autopilot, for nearly three-quarters of an hour before it slammed into a wooded, uninhabited gorge near the town of Grammatikos at 12:03 p.m.
There were no survivors in what officials called Greece’s worst airline accident. Helios airline officials refused to release the passenger list but said 48 of the passengers were “youth travelers” bound for Prague, Czech Republic, after a stopover in Athens.
The flight, a charter, had taken off from Larnaka in Cyprus on its way to Prague via Athens. Greek Defense Ministry officials said no chain of events could be ruled out in a crash that baffled many aviation experts, although by late afternoon, terrorism was being discounted.
State-run news media reported that a malfunction in the aircraft’s oxygen system might have precipitated the crash and that the cabin might have rapidly lost pressure. Many of the victims found in the sheared and burning wreckage were still wearing oxygen masks.
Airport officials in Larnaka said the pilot of the airliner reported problems with the air-conditioning system minutes before losing contact with Greek and Cypriot traffic controllers.
Although the plane was out of radio contact with the ground for more than an hour after that, it appeared that at least some passengers remained conscious. Before the plane crashed, the Greek fighter pilots reported seeing two people trying to take the controls in the cockpit.
“The pilots have turned blue. Farewell cousin – we’re frozen,” one passenger wrote in a text message from a cellphone, according to an interview with a relative on Greece’s Alpha television.
Bereaved and angry relatives flooded the airport in Larnaka, some collapsing in grief, as senior Greek ministers, including the country’s prime minister, Kostas Karamanlis, abandoned their vacations to attend crisis talks in Athens.
Teams of rescue workers, firefighters and ambulances, meanwhile, scrambled to the wooded crash site as authorities evacuated a nearby monastery threatened by a brush fire started by the crash.
“I ran to help, but on arrival, I found dead bodies, human parts and clothing scattered everywhere,” one witness at the crash site said, according to television reports.
One witness told Reuters that the plane’s tail was cut off and that the remaining parts of the plane spread down a hillside about 500 yards away.
Aviation experts were baffled, saying it was rare for a plane to crash because of depressurization.
“Although there are precedents for both pilots losing consciousness at the controls of the 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, a news agency that covers the industry. “It really is all very peculiar. I rather suspect we’re heading for a very complicated investigation.”
Late Sunday, rescue teams said they had located one of the plane’s “black boxes” that record flight data and the voices of the pilots.
In December 2004, three passengers were hospitalized after a Helios plane lost cabin pressure and made an emergency landing at the Larnaka airport. A year earlier, another Helios plane suffered engine problems, diverting to the Greek holiday island of Rhodes.
Airliners are pressurized by a system that draws air from the engines, which compress air for internal use. A valve at the back of the plane determines how fast air is let out of the fuselage.
Aviation experts say that depressurization is rare and that when it occurs, a warning horn sounds in the cockpit, and crew members are supposed to put on oxygen masks and descend to 10,000 feet, where there is enough oxygen for humans to function even in a depressurized aircraft.
In October 1999, a Learjet carrying golfer Payne Stewart and four others crashed in South Dakota after flying hundreds of miles on autopilot. Fighter planes observed the cockpit windows iced over, a sign of depressurization.
After the investigation of that crash, a doctor with the National Transportation Safety Board said pilots’ cognitive ability could fade away quickly when oxygen is limited, often faster than they realize.
Another source of incapacitation could be smoke or fumes in the cockpit. If the problem is not obvious from the wreckage, it may be discerned from tests on the blood of the victims, which will show what they were breathing before they died.