![]() There were 115 passengers, from Greece, Cyprus and Australia, and six crew. We’ll phone if we need you.’”Īt 9.03am, flight 522 crashed into a hillside near the village of Grammatiko, 25 miles from Athens, killing everyone on board. “It was decided I couldn’t be of any use,” Irwin says. As the news of the impending disaster spread, the operations room filled up. In another 20 minutes, flight 522 would crash. Irwin calculated that it had taken off with enough fuel to be in the air for around three hours. I just take the information and work through it.” The plane, now on autopilot, was circling over Athens, as if waiting for permission to land. “Engineers aren’t particularly reactive people. “Everyone was thinking terrorism,” Irwin says. The office had received a chilling report from two jets scrambled by the Hellenic air force to intercept the plane: the captain’s seat was empty the person in the first officer’s seat was slumped over the controls the only three passengers visible were motionless, wearing oxygen masks and masks were dangling from overhead units. It was now more than two hours since takeoff and the plane was still in the air, with 121 people on board. The flight time was one hour and 45 minutes. Flight 522 had taken off from Larnaca for Athens at 6.07am. They had lost radio contact with one of their planes. “Sometimes the engineering manager just wanted to chat about the flying programme or shift patterns,” he says.īut Irwin found the operations room in crisis. It was the operations centre at Helios asking Irwin to go into the office. It was the school holidays and his family were over from Bedfordshire, where they lived during term time. That day, Irwin had started work at 1am, finished at around 6.30am and was planning to take his children to the beach. “My lad used to stand on a plastic box the size of a top hat to take his pool shot,” he remembers. A pool table stands in the open-plan living room. “The work was interesting and the quality of life fabulous,” he says, from the home he designed and built himself in Bedfordshire. On some days he was needed for only a few hours. Irwin’s job was to do the “turnarounds”: checking the plane over after it arrived and ensuring it was safe to take off again. ![]() Helios was based at Larnaca airport and had three aircraft – all Boeing 737s. Small and trim, with wavy hair, he had an affable, hands-on manner his managers liked. He was a familiar face, having worked there in 2002. Helios was found to have “deficiencies” in its organisation, and the Cypriot regulatory authority was accused of “inadequate execution of its safety oversight responsibilities”.That April, Helios Airways, the low-cost Cypriot airline, hired Irwin for six months. ![]() ![]() The report said that the plane’s manufacturer had taken “ineffective” measures in response to previous pressurisation incidents on that particular type of aircraft. The airline, Cypriot regulatory authorities and Boeing were all criticised by the Greek investigators. The pilots of two Greek air force fighter planes, which were scrambled when ground controllers lost radio contact with the passenger jet, reported seeing a flight attendant – the only person still conscious – struggling with the controls before the flight crashed.īefore losing contact, the pilot had reported a problem with the Boeing 737’s air conditioning system. The aeroplane flew on autopilot for two hours, with its pilots slumped over the controls, before it ran out of fuel and crashed into a Greek hillside. The compression system regulates the oxygen supply inside the aircraft, which decreased as it gained altitude causing the passengers and crew to lose consciousness. The pilots did not realise that the cabin’s pressurisation selector had been left in manual position during an inspection before take-off from Larnaca in Cyprus. The Greek report blamed mistakes during technical checks on the ground and failure by pilots to pick up on compression warnings during flight for the Cypriot Helios Airways crash in August 2005. ![]()
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