Oh come on. No journalist worth any salt is going to be satisfied with "ask your government what happened." And besides, it's not that hard to spot a wannabe talking crap, is it?
All you need is some basic training in how to do your research. Since this is technically an anonymous forum, you'd be a moron, the Cyprus Daily Mail, or any number of other journals to cite this forum, wash your hands, and declare the day is over.
Oh wait.
Here's a hint to the journalists: I'm not a pilot, nor do I work in the industry; the only time I've ever been accused of something like that was when I used the phonetic alphabet on L1 pax support.
Do I think there's an engaging story to be told about the Helios incident? Well, contrary to the professionals here, I do. And I think it has nothing to do with that old hackneyed play to the audience's fears, "there's nobody beyond that locked door watching out for us." (By the way, if you must take that angle, please make it metaphorical and political, with plenty of cross cuts to foreign and domestic policy missteps)
The real Helios story is how very few in positions in power, particularly in the Mediterranean world, can face a chaotic world, where simple human oversights, technical niceties, and dumb luck occasionally combine to produce disaster. As Aristotle said, there can be no science of the accidental; the post-Byzantine world's response is to claim that the accidental does not exist. Thus a simple tragedy becomes a political football in Greece and Cyprus: the opposition party blames the current government; the current government blames the opposition party, back when they were in power. Meanwhile, the conspiracy nuts, who cannot stand the idea that anything happens without meaning, weigh in with even worse conspiracies.
The crash is less than a year old, and it's second only to Itavia in terms of conspiracy theories and sheer crap that's been generated. There have been so many press opinions, official leaks, non-official non-leaks, parliamentary investigations, and who knows what else, that, to be honest, there is no chance in my mind that any worthwhile technical observations will come out of this. For that matter, odds are we will probably never know the "truth" of the incident. Tsolakis may surprise us on this one, though.
There's no point in trolling here. Besides, proper journalism involves contacting people personally, not generally. A general post like that will only get you the most extreme nutcases of the previous discussions: go ahead and read them -- there are some scary types around here.
Oh yeah, right. The truth doesn't sell; fear does.[/rant]