ATHENS, 17 August 2005 — The co-pilot and a flight attendant were among dozens of people still alive when a Cypriot airliner crashed in Greece, Athens’ chief coroner said yesterday, deepening the mystery over what incapacitated the flight carrying 121 people.
Chief Coroner Fillipos Koutsaftis told The Associated Press that co-pilot Pambos Haralambous was alive when the Helios Airways jet crashed Sunday into a mountainside near Grammatiko, 40 kilometers (25 miles) north of Athens, killing everyone on board.
The pilots of two Greek F-16 fighter jets that intercepted the plane after it lost contact with Greek air traffic controllers as it entered Greek airspace reported seeing Haralambous slumped over the controls in the cockpit, apparently unconscious, shortly before the crash. The fighter pilots reported seeing oxygen masks dangling from the ceiling of the plane’s passenger cabin.
They said the plane’s German pilot was not in the cockpit.
His body has not been identified. Only 26 of the 118 bodies recovered from the crash site have been identified by relatives, while investigators were still searching for the remaining three. A Greek C-130 military transport plane took off from Athens late yesterday carrying the remains of 23 people to Cyprus for burial, the Cypriot Embassy in Athens said.
The bodies of Haralambous and a flight attendant were found next to the cockpit wreckage, said Akrivos Tsolakis, head of the Greek airline safety committee.
Coroners stress they have not been able to determine if the crew and passengers were conscious when the plane crashed. The results of toxicological tests to determine if they were knocked out by toxic fumes or gases, such as carbon monoxide, would take about two weeks, they said.
Authorities have said the crash appears to have been caused by technical failure — resulting in high-altitude decompression that could have rendered the people on board unconscious.
Aviation experts have said they are puzzled: Warnings should go off if an airliner suddenly loses pressure, and pilots are trained to immediately put their oxygen masks on and dive to about 12,000 feet, where there is enough oxygen for people to breathe.
