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Crash: Voice recording missing
16/08/2005 16:13 - (SA)
Athens, Greece - Officials said on Tuesday they had found only the exterior container of the cockpit voice recorder from a Cypriot airliner crash that killed 121 people, hampering investigative efforts into the accident's cause.
Autopsies on the bodies of 25 victims, including one flight attendant, showed they were alive when the plane went down, Athens coroner Nikos Kalogrias said on Tuesday.
Kalogrias, one of a team of seven coroners, said the 25 victims' hearts and lungs were functioning when the plane crashed. "The attendant was alive and died of injuries" sustained in the crash, he said.
Coroners conducted the first six autopsies on Monday.
By early Tuesday afternoon they had nearly finished examining all 26 bodies identified by relatives, including that of co-pilot Pambos Haralambous, Kalogrias said.
Private Greek television channel Mega reported that the autopsy on Haralambous' body showed he too had been alive at the time of the crash. Possibly unconscious
Athens' chief coroner Fillipos Koutsaftis said late on Monday that while victims had been alive at the time of crash, he could not rule out that they were unconscious when the Helios Airways Boeing 737-300 went down near Grammatiko.
Pilots of two Greek F-16 fighter jets that intercepted the plane after it lost contact with Greek air traffic controllers had reported seeing the co-pilot slumped over the controls in the cockpit, apparently unconscious. There was no sign in the cockpit of the plane's German pilot, and his body was one of three not yet found.
A brush fire sparked by the crash burned through much of the debris scattered across two ravines and surrounding slopes, charring many bodies beyond recognition. Flight data recorder
Akrivios Tsolakis, the head of the Greek airline safety committee, said the internal components of the plane's voice recorder were ejected from the container when the plane crashed.
"The only fortunate event in the investigation is that we have the flight data recorder," he said, adding that the box would be flown to Paris on Wednesday for decoding.
The voice recorder picks up any conversation inside the cockpit, but records only the last 30 minutes of sound. Because the airplane appeared to have been flying disabled for about three hours, it wasn't clear if the recording would be useful to investigators.
- AP
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