flight HCY 522 is a strange and chilling one. It ended as a junior the plane, where the two pilots sat unconscious.
As circling fighter planes watched, the 25-year-old steward, Andreas Prodromou, clutched an oxygen bottle and fought to handle the controls.
But he was too late: the fuel ran out, the engines died, and the Boeing 737-300 dived into a Greek hillside on August 14 last year, killing all 121 people on board. These may have been the first York and Washington on September 11, 2001.
Helios, which has ceased operating in the wake of the crash, was Cyprus.
It was the sort of airline that should not have been flying. The report of the Greek board of inquiry into the crash, recently published, paints a picture of a tiny, cheap company whose management was a shambles. The report quotes Helios' chief operating officer, Bryan Field who had joined the firm from was extremely high with inadequate downtime.
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multinational crew and engineers, many on short-term seasonal contracts, the crash investigators found.
airline's operations, leaving this supervision to Britain's Civil Aviation Authority. But the authority allowed Helios to carry on flying despite its grave safety weaknesses.
On top of all this, the Greek report said, there was a design problem with the Boeing 737 warning alarm. It gave the same intermittent blast for two different faults, depending on whether the plane was on the ground or in flight.
However, this hair-raising list of deficiencies might still have again on its next leg to Prague.
Helios technicians did a pressure check at Larnaca airport in Cyprus, but then failed to reset a crucial air conditioning switch from manual to auto. The pilots missed this error on their checklist. They set the autopilot and Within 13 minutes, as the plane climbed, the air pressure slowly dropped.
The effects of hypoxia (oxygen starvation) are insidious. on the flight deck.
unconsciousness.
In the main cabin, however, as the planeload of passengers settled down sleepily, the cabin crew suddenly had their first dramatic indication that something was wrong. What air crew pressure reached danger levels. Yet the plane carried on climbing, instead of carrying out an emergency descent.
Both pilots were sealed behind their bullet-proof door, in the grip of a fatal Neither put on an oxygen mask, according to investigators.
No one will know exactly what happened next. All the cabin masks ran out of oxygen after 15 minutes, which is all the system allows for.
But almost two hours later, as the plane flew on at 6000 metres with its cargo of unconscious people, the pilots of two astonished to see a young cabin steward get into the cockpit. He frantically shouted "Mayday" into the radio.
No one knows whether he had been trying codes at random, or had finally found the combination on the body of the senior steward, the only one permitted to know it.
In any event, he was far too late. A series of errors and mismanagement had brought about the crisis.
But, as the sober language of the Greek investigation inquiry records, it should still have been possible for the cabin staff, had they not been locked out, to intervene even at the last moment.
developing problems," it concluded.
parties, painted on the remains of the tail of the Helios Boeing. It was serving as a tombstone for 121 people.
doors. When published in Athens in October, it buried within the the cockpit, Helios staff appeared to have been poorly aware of emergency procedures.
Disturbingly, there had already been related emergencies on 737, Irish investigators had warned of "the potential for a emergency that later caused the Greek crash.
one specific problem, it may be creating another one or more problems that could impinge on aviation safety.
policy. This is a problem.
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Similarly in 2004, British investigators described how a fire off from Heathrow. Cabin staff spent time desperately banging on Chris Roberts, a recently retired senior airline pilot and manager, says: "With the locked cockpit door in place, communications are more difficult."
training needed.
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doors were still generally open, an Aer Lingus flight attendant was that passenger oxygen masks had dropped. Air conditioning had inadvertently been switched off.
As late as January 2001, British Airways was adamant that locked doors were too dangerous to adopt.
Following an incident in which a mentally ill passenger attacked the pilots of a jumbo jet, BA chief because it does not make sense. Locking the door would cause more safety problems than it would solve."
vice-chairwoman, Carol Carmody.
She said in May 2002: "We must be compromised. Access to the cockpit can be very important in an emergency."
those words.
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