Farewell text sent moments before plane crash kills 121
The only piece of Helios Airways flight ZU522 that remained intact was the tail section of the jet and debris was strewn in a chasm and surrounding hills. Bodies, clothing, and luggage were scattered around the wreckage, which triggered brush fires.
Sotiris Voutas, a cousin of one of the passengers on the plane, said that he received a text message from him: “He told me the pilots were unconscious ... he said: ‘Farewell, cousin, here we’re frozen.’”
The flight was headed from Larnaca, Cyprus, to Athens International Airport when it crashed at about 12.20pm local time (10.20am Irish time) 25 miles north of Athens. The Boeing 737 was due to fly on to Prague, Czech Republic.
Helios spokesman Giorgos Dimitriou said most of the passenger were Greek Cypriots.
Greek police said 115 passengers and six crew were on board the flight, of whom 59 adults and eight children were heading to Athens and 48 to Prague, including two children.
The pilots of two F-16 jet fighters who intercepted the plane over the Aegean Sea shortly before it crashed saw one of the airliner’s pilots slumped over the controls, air force officials were quoted as saying. It was unclear where the other pilot was.
The two black boxes from the crashed Cypriot plane were located.
A spokesperson for the Cyprus government said that there were no signs it was a terrorist attack.
“From what we’ve heard so far, it’s possible that there was some sort of problem with the plane,” Greek government spokesperson Theodoros Roussopoulos said.
The coldness in the cabin suggested “the crew may have been suffering from lack of oxygen”, said David Kaminski Morrow, deputy news editor of the British-based Air Transport Intelligence magazine.
In Grammatiko, more than 100 firefighters, aided by eight special planes and three helicopters dropping water, fought a huge brush fire caused by the crash.
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