Cypriot airliner crash to be re-enacted
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_i...6a6a20051217ah
December 16 2005 at 02:03PM
By Michele Kambas
Nicosia - Greek investigators will re-enact the flight of a doomed Cypriot airliner on December 19 in an effort to discover why the plane crashed north of Athens in August killing all 121 people on board.
The Boeing 737-300 operated by Helios Airways rammed into a hillside on August 14, the worst accident on record for either Greece or Cyprus and the worst in Europe this year.
Investigators are trying to work out what happened on board the plane - travelling from Larnaca in Cyprus to Prague - to render its two pilots unconscious, leaving a flight attendant with an emergency oxygen kit grappling with the controls
Costas Orphanos, head of the Cypriot crash investigation committee, said authorities had formed a picture of what had happened, but needed the re-enactment to verify the findings.
"What happened was unheard of, the way it happened was unheard of," Orphanos said when asked what made the disaster different from other air crashes.
He declined to be more specific pending release of the committee's findings at the end of February.
"It will be something which should concern the aviation industry as a whole, and it is our obligation to ensure that nothing like this happens again," he said.
"I haven't seen anything like this before, and I've been in the aviation industry for 40 years."
Seventeen people, pilots and engineers, will take part in Monday's flight using an Olympic Airways Boeing 737-300. Orphanos gave no further details.
The Helios jet crashed into the Greek mountains after flying on autopilot for over two-and-a-half hours. It is thought that the passengers, the majority of them Cypriots, were unconscious.
Two Greek fighter jets scrambled to intercept what was then regarded as a "renegade aircraft" and saw the co-pilot slumped in the cockpit and a steward wrestling with the controls. The pilot was nowhere to be seen.
Helios, a subsidiary of Britain's Libra Holidays Group, has defended its maintenance record but disclosed the aircraft had previously had decompression problems.
Air decompression reduces oxygen supplies and can lead to rapid loss of consciousness.
Relatives of the dead said they were still struggling to come to terms with their loss, a heavy blow to a small Mediterranean island with less than one million people.
"Some say time heals all wounds. In our case the anxiety and waiting to find out what happened just opens wounds further," said relatives' representative Nicholas Yiasoumis.
Relatives will not be present at the re-enactment.