Cypriot police raid crash airline’s headquarters
Police spokeswoman Christalla Dimitriou said officers “carried out a search” after asking the city’s court for a warrant.
No arrests were made and she did not say whether police had confiscated any material from the office.
Chief Athens coroner Fillipos Koutsaftis, meanwhile, said that tests conducted on the remains showed at least six of the 121 victims were alive when the aircraft went down.
“We have performed autopsies on six people. Our conclusion is they had circulation and were breathing at the time of death,” Koutsaftis said, but he added they may have been unconscious.
Most of the bodies recovered were frozen solid, a Greek official said.
“Autopsy on passengers so far shows the bodies were frozen solid, including some whose skin was charred by flames from the crash,” the Defence Ministry source said.
An expert said reports of extreme cold suggested there was no air circulating in the cabin.
Kieran Daly, editor of British-based magazine Air Transport Intelligence, said: “That really suggests there was possibly no air circulating in the cabin at all.”
There are also reports that the pilots of the F16 jet fighters, scrambled when the jet was declared ‘renegade’ in Greek air space, saw passengers trying to take control of the plane.
The Defence Ministry said it suspected the plane’s oxygen supply or pressurisation system may have malfunctioned, which could have led to death within seconds for all on board.
The pilots had reported air-conditioning system problems to Cyprus air traffic control about a half-hour after takeoff from Larnaca Airport.
The Boeing 737 lost radio contact within minutes of entering Greek air space over the Aegean.
Two Greek F16s were dispatched and when they intercepted the plane at 34,000ft, the jet pilots saw the co-pilot slumped over in his seat.
The captain was not in the cockpit, and oxygen masks dangled inside the cabin, said government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos.
He said the jet pilots also saw two people trying to take control of the plane; it was unclear if they were passengers or crew members.
The plane apparently was on auto-pilot when it crashed, a Helios spokesman said.
“When a pilot has no communication with the control tower, the procedure dictates other planes must accompany and help the plane land. Unfortunately, it appeared the pilot was already dead as was, possibly, everyone else on the plane,” said Cyprus Transport Minister Haris Thrasou.
But damage to a cockpit voice recorder could hinder efforts to discover the cause of the disaster.
The Helios Airways flight had been heading from Larnaca to Athens and was to have continued to Prague in the Czech Republic when it came down near the village of Grammatiko, north of the Greek capital.
An air safety chief said the recorder - one of two black box flight recorders recovered from the aircraft - was badly damaged.
The boxes were being sent to Paris for examination but safety chief Akrivos Tsolakis said the voice recorder was “in a bad state and, possibly, won’t give us the information we need”.
Investigators will want to know what caused the problem that led to a loss of cabin pressure, if a back-up oxygen system for the pilots failed or whether they were overcome before being able to don oxygen masks.
“The captain of the plane was German, in his 50s and very experienced. The co-pilot was aged around 45 and also very experienced,” said Vicky Xitas, Helios’s commercial manager.
“Our own experts have joined the other investigators and our executives have flown to Greece.”
At 34,000ft - the altitude where the F16 jets met the airliner - the effects of depressurisation are swift, said Air Transport Intelligence’s David Kaminski Morrow.
“If the aircraft is at 30,000ft, you don’t stay conscious for long, maybe 15 to 30 seconds,” he said.
“But if you are down at 10,000ft, you can breathe for a lot longer.”
In Cyprus, the pilots and crew of Helios Airways yesterday refused to fly after reports that passengers had complained that the plane that crashed had past technical problems.
Greek television quoted Mr Thrasou as saying the plane had decompression problems in the past.
But a Helios representative said the plane had “no problems and was serviced just last week”.
Greek investigators were to be joined by American experts after a request by the US administration because the aircraft was manufactured there.
Helios is owned by British and Cyprus-registered tour operator Libra Holidays Group.
It operates scheduled services from Cyprus to Dublin and Belfast.
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