Cypriot plane crash 'a mystery'
2005-08-15 06:42
Athens - Accident investigators faced a mystery as rescuers continued their search for bodies on Monday, after a Cypriot airliner slammed into a wooded hillside near Athens with the loss of more than 120 lives amid harrowing accounts of an apparent crisis in the plane's cockpit.
Two Greek air force F16 fighters scrambled to investigate on Sunday, after communications were suddenly lost with the Helios Airways twin-engine aircraft, Greek and Cypriot officials said.
Two 'tried to fly doomed plane'
The fighter pilots "saw two people in the cockpit, we don't know if they were crew members or passengers, appearing to want to take over the controls," said Greek government spokesman Theodore Roussopoulos.
They saw "the co-pilot slumped over and perhaps unconscious and the pilot not in his seat," he said, adding that the oxygen masks were "activated" in the cockpit.
Terrorist attack ruled out
The Greek government has initially ruled out a terrorist attack.
The plane was about to land at Athens airport for a stopover on its journey from Larnaca in Cyprus to the Czech capital Prague when it crashed at Varnava, a largely uninhabited area 40km northeast of Athens, at 12:20.
'We're going to die. Farewell'
According to the Greek private TV station Alpha, a passenger sent a text message to a cousin saying: "We're cold, the pilot is blue. We're going to die. Farewell."
But it was not clear whether the pilot had left the cockpit to enter the passenger cabin or whether the sender of the text message had been in the cockpit.
A senior official at the public order ministry, however, speculated that a sudden drop in cabin pressure could have caused the disaster.
The official said the pilot had mentioned a problem with the Boeing 737's air-conditioning system before losing contact.
Depressurisation 'not to blame'
But in Paris, accident investigator Francois Grangier told press that a sudden loss of pressurisation would not have caused the plane to crash, nor would it have made the pilots immediately lose consciousness.
The plane would have been at fairly low altitude as it approached Athens airport, and Grangier said loss of pressurisation would not have had any effect on the aircraft's structure.
He also said the pilots would have had their own oxygen supply.
Another expert said that in the case of sudden depressurisation because of structural damage, for example the blowing out of a window, the internal temperature would plummet and the plane would crash.
At the crash site, Greek police said "there was no trace of survivors" among the 115 passengers and six crew whose bodies were burned almost beyond recognition.
A search for bodies was continuing on Monday as shocked relatives of the victims arrived from Larnaca, the main airport on Cyprus.
- SAPA