DEBKAfile - The Cypriot Air Crash Continues to Baffle the Investigation

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The Cypriot Air Crash Continues to Baffle the Investigation

DEBKAfile Special Report

August 10, 2005

If the Greek investigators could find out why no lunch was served to the passengers of the doomed Helios Airways flight, they might find a clue as to the moment when the crew became incapacitated.

This is one of the key questions asked by investigators led by Akrivos Tsolakis of the transport ministry in Athens into the causes of the Cypriot plane’s crash north of Athens Aug. 14 en route from Larnaca to Prague.

Another question relates to the two mystery people reportedly observed in the cockpit at moment of the communications break-off between the airliner and Larnaca control tower early in the fatal flight. Were they passengers trying to save the plane after the pilots were incapacitated? Or possibly hijackers making sure the plane would not survive the flight?

The passenger list as released by the Cypriot police includes 103 Greek-Cypriot nationals, many of Armenian origin, and 12 Greeks. The pilot was German and the rest of the crew Greek. Most are presumed Christians, but Muslims who form 18% of the Cypriot population may have been among them. That is the third key question whose answer awaits identification of all the bodies, some by

DNA testing which takes 10 days for results.

Helios president Andreas Drakos admitted that a depressurization problem had occurred on a Boeing 737 Warsaw-Larnaca flight last December but stressed that the plane had been checked by the British authorities in London and the manufacturers and declared airworthy.

According to the evidence of the Greek coroner, 12 of the victims were alive when the Boeing came down but may have fainted.

A former Helios engineer Kyriakos Pilavakis told the investigation that loss of cabin oxygen is a common event. He said the pilots had a big tank full of oxygen under their seats. It was not connected to the passengers’ supply. Pilavakis did not believe the disaster was caused by decompression.

The investigators have still to report on their questioning of the two Greek air force F-16 pilots on their visual impressions of the doomed plane just before it crashed into a mountain north of Athens. They earlier reported they saw one pilot slumped in his seat and the second absent, and oxygen masks dangling over the motionless passengers.

The flight recorders may answer some puzzling questions which prompted the Greek army chief to say a terrorist hijacking cannot ruled out and which sent Mediterranean airports on hijack alert. The fragmentation of the plane into small bits of widely scattered debris suggests a possible explosion.

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