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Mysterious Greek Jet Crash Kills 121

Posted on: Monday, 15 August 2005, 15:00 CDT

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, though 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.

Though 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 cell phone, according to an interview with a relative on Greece's Alpha television.

Teams of rescue workers, firefighters and ambulances scrambled to the wooded crash site as authorities evacuated a nearby monastery threatened by a brush fire started by the crash.

Late on Sunday, rescue teams said they had located one of the plane's "black boxes," two orange-colored devices that record flight data and voices of the pilots.

Source: Deseret News (Salt Lake City)

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