Officials said his cousin’s name was not on the Cypriot government’s official list of victims. Meanwhile, officials yesterday said that a claim by a Greek man that he’d received an instant message from a freezing “cousin” in the final minutes of the flight was a hoax, and arrested Nektarios-Sotirios Voulas, 32. “They had circulation and heartbeat, so they were alive.” An early report, quoting a Greek official, said bodies recovered from the wreckage were “frozen solid,” triggering grim speculation that the cabin may have lost pressure well before the plane crashed.Īt 34,000 feet, the air temperature is minus 58 degrees. “That does not mean that they were conscious but that they had breath and circulation,” Chief Coroner Philippos Koutsaftis told reporters. Preliminary autopsies showed that at least six of the victims were alive when the plane went down. On 14 August 2005, a Boeing 737-300 aircraft departed. Nonetheless, investigators looking for clues in the worst aviation disaster in Greek history raided Helios’ offices in Cyprus’ coastal city of Larnaca. Buy a copy of AIR CRASH INVESTIGATIONS: the Crash of Helios Airways Flight 522 book by Hans Griffioen. They could not tell if the two were passengers or crew members.įorty minutes later the plane was in pieces.Ĭyprus Transport Minister Haris Thrasou told a Greek television station that the plane had decompression problems in the past, but a Helios representative said the plane had “no problems and was serviced just last week.” Instead, they saw two people desperately struggling with the controls. The F-16 pilots made a second pass, and still found no sign of the captain. They saw the co-pilot slumped over in his seat, and oxygen masks dangling in the cabin. When the pilots of Helios Airways Flight 522 did not respond to air traffic control, two Greek pilots scrambled to the rescue in F-16s. Captain Martin Hans Gurgen, 58, of Berlin, was among the missing – after mysteriously disappearing from the cockpit during the flight’s last, crucial minutes. He wasn’t seen in the cockpit when a pair of F-16s scrambled to intercept the 737 that lost contact with the Athens control tower Sunday – possibly after losing cabin pressure at 34,000 feet.Īnd investigators – who have now exposed the text message from a freezing passenger as bogus – have yet to find the pilot’s body amid the wreckage strewn across the hillside.Īuthorities yesterday said all but two bodies were recovered from the crash site. That’s the question authorities were looking to answer yesterday in the mysterious crash of a Cypriot airliner that went down in the mountains north of Athens, killing 121 passengers and crew.
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