The potential multi-faceted perils of airline travel are hammered home with the news that the 121 who perished in a Cyprus air disaster may have been dead when the jet slammed into a mountain –frozen to death in the air.
Various news reports paint a harrowing portrait of a plane where some kind of mechanical failure dropped the temperature so low that the pilot’s face was turning blue and, by one account, the pilots had apparently passed out, causing people who may have been passengers to scramble to take control of the death-plane. From the BBC:
The 121 victims of the Cyprus air disaster may have been dead before the plane smashed into a mountainside in Greece, officials have said.
Unconfirmed reports say bodies were found frozen. It is thought passengers — among them 48 children — may have experienced low temperatures after a sudden drop in cabin pressure….
Helios insists its plane was airworthy but Greek television has reported that the 737 had a history of technical faults.
On one recent flight from Warsaw to Larnaca, it said, passengers were taken off the plane suffering from respiratory problems.
More and more, it sounds as if the in the seconds immediately before its crash the plane was simply out of control — either with horrified passengers trying to guide it (unlikely), or carrying a totally dead and frozen cargo and flying on autopilot (likely). From Reuters:
The plane was on a flight from Larnaca to Prague with a stop in Athens. Greek authorities ruled out any hijacking or terrorism links to the crash.
The flight was declared “renegade” when it entered Greek air space and failed to make radio contact. Two F-16 air force jets were scrambled to investigate and reported that the co-pilot was slumped in the cockpit and the pilot was not visible.
Defence Ministry officials said 90 minutes elapsed between the alert being raised and the plane crashing at 12:03 p.m.
Greek government spokesman Theodore Roussopoulos said the F-16 pilots reported that with the pilots out of action there may have been a last-gasp effort by others on the plane to bring it back under control.
“The F-16s saw two individuals in the cockpit seemingly trying to regain control of the aeroplane,” Roussoupoulos said. It was not known if they were passengers or other crew.
“The F-16s also saw oxygen masks down when they got close to the aircraft. The aircraft was making continuous right-hand turns to show it had lost radio contact.”
“A passenger on the doomed plane said in an SMS text to his cousin in Athens: “The pilot has turned blue. Cousin farewell, we’re freezing.”
Kieran Daly, editor of Air Transport Intelligence, told Reuters: “When he talks about being extremely cold, that really suggests that there was possibly no air circulating in the cabin at all.”
Other questions included how the plane appeared to fly for so long with the pilots unconscious or dead. Media speculated it was on auto pilot and crashed when it ran out of fuel after being in the air for twice the scheduled flight time.
The Defence Ministry said it suspected the plane’s oxygen supply or pressurisation system may have malfunctioned, which could have led to death within seconds for all on board.
And now the airline involved is facing a mini-rebellion, according to the Telegraph:
The owner of the Greek airliner that crashed, killing all 121 people on board, has grounded all its planes.
Helios Airways decided today to halt flights after crew and passengers refused to board a plane of the same model as the aircraft that crashed in Greece yesterday.
“The company did this of its own volition after the strength of public opinion,” a Cyprus Transport Ministry spokesman said.
Helios Airways flight ZU 522 crashed yesterday morning in a mountainous region north of Athens.
The cause of the crash was unclear, but first indications were that it was apparently due to some type of technical problem – possibly decompression.
Decompression isn’t the kind of fear many travelers have when they get on a plane. The biggest fear is for some kind of incident involving engine trouble, or windshear. The image of the blue-faced pilot will linger.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, writes a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.