Off The Record
‘Ghost Plane’ Flew For Hours With Passengers Unconscious In Their Seats Before Crash Killed Everyone On Board
The whole tale of a tragic aircraft that was termed a “ghost plane” has come to light after its passengers were left comatose for hours on end.
On August 14, 2005, Helios Airways Flight 522 crashed in the sky over Greece, taking the lives of all 115 passengers and six crew members.
According to the Mirror, the plane lost contact and finally crashed into a mountainous area close to Grammatiko.
‘Olympia,’ a Boeing 737-300, was flying to Prague from Larnaca International Airport in Cyprus, stopping in Athens en route.
After more than sixty minutes without receiving any message, two F-16 fighter jets from the Greek military were sent to look into the matter.
They discovered the plane circling at 35,000 feet, a catastrophe just around the corner.
All those on board perished in the jet catastrophe that occurred less than three hours after takeoff.
First Officer Pampos Charalambous, a 51-year-old Cypriot national who had worked for the airline for five years, and Captain Hans-Jürgen Merten, a 58-year-old Helios Airways contract pilot, made up the flight crew.
They had flown nearly 25,000 hours together, nearly 10,000 of those in Boeing 737s, but shortly after departure, they made a deadly error.
The crew mistook the cabin altitude warning horn for the takeoff configuration alert since the two alarms sounded the same.
They made the decision to disregard it and kept moving forward. The cabin started to lose pressure as the jet ascended, but the crew was oblivious to the gradual loss of oxygen.
The pilots notified the airline’s operations center about an air conditioning problem seven minutes into the flight.
The crew was starting to feel the symptoms of hypoxia, or low oxygen, which can cause confusion and incapacitation, even before oxygen masks were deployed in the cabin at 18,000 feet.
The Daily Star said that the aircraft leveled down at 34,000 feet, which is significantly higher than the safe oxygen threshold. The Boeing 737 circled on autopilot at this point, and the crew had passed out.
When air traffic control could not establish touch with the aircraft, two Greek F-16 fighter jets were sent out.
The first officer was slumped over the controls, unconscious, and the captain’s seat was empty, according to the fighter pilots’ startling discovery. Masks for oxygen hung from the ceiling within the cabin, but no one moved.
The flight attendant Andreas Prodromou was the only one to remain conscious and entered the cockpit in a last-ditch effort to save the aircraft with a portable oxygen supply.
Prodromou waved to the fighter jets for a brief moment before the left engine of the aircraft failed. Prodromou was not trained to operate a Boeing 737, despite having a UK commercial pilot license.
The 25-year-old tried to guide the plane away from Athens even though he knew he wouldn’t make it, probably in an effort to reduce the number of casualties by crashing in a rural area.
The aircraft crashed into a mountainside 25 miles from Athens when the right engine failed ten minutes after the left engine failed.
Most of the bodies in the collision and ensuing fireball were beyond recognition burnt, although autopsies showed that many of the passengers were still alive when the catastrophe occurred.
Multiple systemic flaws at Helios Airways were found throughout investigations. In the weeks preceding the tragedy, the airline reportedly encountered persistent problems with the aircraft’s air conditioning system, which prompted seven different inspections, according to Simple Flying. Members of the crew reported hearing pounding noises and seeing ice on one of the doors the night before the disaster.
Engineers at Helios conducted a pressurization test after the last flight, converting the system from automated to manual.
After the check, they neglected to switch the setting back to automatic, which ultimately resulted in the aircraft’s unpressurized ascent out of Larnaca.
During pre-flight inspections, Helios Airways personnel also failed to notice the error. The plane consequently took off fully depressurized, which created the ideal conditions for catastrophe.
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