Yet the plane carried on climbing, instead of carrying out an emergency descent. What air crew call the "rubber jungle" - the forest of oxygen masks over the passengers' seating - sprang down automatically as the air pressure reached danger levels. 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. There were only minutes to go before both pilots slipped into unconsciousness. Their radio calls to the ground made clear that they had misunderstood the true nature of the warning horn that was blaring on the flight deck. The pilots' judgment became impaired without them realising it. The effects of hypoxia (oxygen starvation) are insidious. Within 13 minutes, as the plane climbed, the air pressure slowly dropped. They set the autopilot and the plane computer to reach cruising height and head for a Greek radio beacon.
The pilots missed this error on their checklist.
Helios airways flight 522 flight attendant manual#
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. Flight HCY 522 flew safely from London to Cyprus but reported a possible pressure problem with another door, before setting off again on its next leg to Prague. However, this hair-raising list of deficiencies might still have resulted in a safe outcome, had the door to the cockpit stayed open. It gave the same intermittent blast for two different faults, depending on whether the plane was on the ground or in flight. On top of all this, the Greek report said, there was a design problem with the Boeing 737 that made it possible for pilots to confuse the meaning of a warning alarm. But the CAA allowed Helios to carry on flying despite its grave safety weaknesses. The captain of the doomed plane, Hans-Jurgen Merten, 58, was a brusque east German "of few words", and his Cypriot co-pilot, Pambos Paralambous, had a bad heart and a poor track record for carrying out vital checklists, according to a source close to the inquiry.Ĭyprus did not take responsibility for the safety of the airline's operations, leaving this supervision to Britain's Civil Aviation Authority.
Helios had only four planes, and was run by a floating group of multinational crew and engineers, many on short-term seasonal contracts or obtained from agencies, the crash investigators found. He helped launch Priceright, a British tour operator, before setting up Libra Holidays Group, which sells package tours to Cyprus. Helios's Greek Cypriot owner, Andreas Drakou, is a British-based businessman. He added: "Aircraft utilisation was extremely high with. The report quotes Helios's chief operating officer, Bryan Field - who had joined the firm from British Airways two weeks before the crash - describing his concern at a "culture of fear where people were encouraged to stretch the rules to the limits". 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. With or without the locked cockpit door, it was the sort of airline that should not have been flying. Helios, which has ceased operating in the wake of the crash, was a cut-rate airline carrying British holidaymakers to and from Cyprus. According to evidence obtained by the Guardian, these may have been the first lives claimed because of the worldwide decision to lock plane cockpit doors in the wake of the airborne terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001. 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. As circling fighter planes watched, the 25-year-old steward, Andreas Prodromou, clutched an oxygen bottle and fought to handle the controls. It ended as a junior steward finally succeeded in breaking into the locked cockpit of the plane, where the two pilots sat unconscious. The story of the last hours of the passengers on Helios Airways flight HCY 522 is a strange and chilling one.
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