Helios Airways Flight 522
2005 aviation accident in Greece From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Remove ads
On August 14, 2005, Helios Airways Flight 522 covered the route between Larnaca International Airport (Cyprus), and Ruzyně International Airport (Prague, Czech Republic), with a stopover in Athens (Greece). The aircraft, a Boeing 737, crashed on a mountain at 09:04 UTC on that day, near Grammatiko, 40 km north of Athens while on approach to Athens airport capital, killing all 115 passengers and 6 crew members on board.[1][2]
It is the deadliest aviation disaster in Greek history.
Remove ads
Flight crew
The flight captain was Hans-Jürgen Merten, a 59-year-old pilot had a total of 16,900 flight hours, 5,500 of them on Boeing 737s.
The first officer was Pampos Charalambous, a 51-year-old Cypriot pilot who had flown exclusively on Helios for the last five years, accumulating 7,549 flight hours throughout his career, 3,991 of them on the Boeing 737.
Chronology
Remove ads
Passengers
The bodies of 118 people were recovered.[4] The passenger list included 93 adults and 22 children. The passengers comprised 103 Cypriot nationals and 12 Greek nationals.[5]
Cause
The cause of the accident was due to the fact that after takeoff, as the aircraft gained altitude, a failure when configuring the pressurization regulator caused the loss of consciousness of both the pilots and the passengers due to hypoxia, turning the aircraft into a "ghost flight" that was only kept flying by the operation of the autopilot. Finally, already over Greek territory, it hit a hill due to lack of fuel.
Remove ads
Other accidents
The accident was the largest in the history of Greek aviation, along with one of the most serious in August 2005, a dark month for commercial aviation, which also featured, among others, the tragedies of West Caribbean Airways Flight 708 and TANS Perú Flight 204.
References
Other websites
Wikiwand - on
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Remove ads