Helios/Ajet to stop flying
This was on the news yestersday, an inevitable conclusion I suppose, and very sad to those who fly there.
October 30, 2006
A Cypriot commercial airline, which changed its name after Cyprus's worst aviation disaster, said it would terminate flight operations.
AJet, successor company to Helios Airways, will end its flight schedule within three months, said holding company Libra Holidays in a statement released to the stock exchange on Monday.
Libra said the decision was based on financial considerations. AJet will remain a legal entity because of financial claims against third parties, it said.
The carrier has suffered a barrage of bad publicity over its safety track record since its Boeing 737-300 crashed into a Greek hillside on August 14, 2005, killing all 121 people on board.
In one of the most mysterious disasters in aviation history, the aircraft flew on autopilot for more than two hours after taking off from Larnaca in Cyprus for Prague. It crashed from lack of fuel as a flight attendant with rudimentary pilot's training and the only person apparently conscious on the aircraft grappled with the controls.
Greek F-16 fighter pilots, which scrambled to intercept the aircraft after it failed to respond to radio calls, saw the attendant in the cockpit and oxygen masks hanging in the cabin.
A Greek investigator's report released in early October blamed the crash on deficient technical checks, the pilots' failure to pick up on compression warnings regulating oxygen supplies and shortcomings in the safety culture at Helios.
It also blamed Cyprus's regulatory authority for an inadequate execution of its oversight responsibility and planemaker Boeing for failing to respond to previous pressurization incidents.
The carrier has challenged the report, saying it offered no adequate or plausible explanation of how its alleged shortcomings could be linked to the accident.
(Reuters)