Plane made mayday call seconds before crash

Two seconds before impact, the last man conscious in the cockpit of a doomed Cypriot airliner made a desperate call for help – “Mayday, Mayday” – before the plane carrying 121 people smashed into a mountain near Athens.

Chief investigator Akrivos Tsolakis said the man – believed to be a flight attendant with pilot training – twice issued distress calls in the final 10 minutes of Helios Airways Flight 522.

“The second time was a couple of seconds before the crash,” Tsolakis said, adding the man had “a very weak tone of voice.”

Earlier today, Tsolakis issued a preliminary report on the August 14 crash which killed all 115 passengers and six crew.

It said the Boeing 737-300 had lost cabin pressure and eventually ran out of fuel. A man wearing an oxygen mask, believed to be 25-year-old Andreas Prodromou, tried to steer the plane for the last 10 minutes.

In his first appeal, he cried “Mayday” three times – but the plane’s communications had apparently been set to the wrong frequency, Tsolakis said.

Greek investigators, aided by the US National Transportation Safety Board, are continuing to probe the tragedy, the worst ever in Greece and Cyprus and considered one of the most baffling in aviation history.

Tsolakis presented his initial findings following analysis of flight recorders and autopsies on all 118 bodies recovered from the site. Three bodies have not been found.

The report appears to confirm initial suspicions that people aboard the Helios Airways plane were incapacitated by a loss of cabin pressure early in the flight at about 34,000 feet and that someone tried to save the flight shortly before it crashed.

It remains unclear how the would-be rescuer stayed conscious.

The Helios flight from Larnaca, Cyprus to Athens, ran out of fuel before crashing near the village of Grammatiko, 25 miles north of Athens, the report said.

On the day of the crash, two Greek air force F-16 fighter planes were scrambled to intercept the plane.

The fighter pilots reported seeing the co-pilot slumped over the controls, apparently unconscious, and said the pilot was not in his seat. They also reported seeing an unidentified man in the cockpit and oxygen masks dangling in the plane’s passenger cabin.

“There are indications of technical problems in the pressurisation system … There is proof that the engines of the plane stopped working because the fuel supply was exhausted, and that this was the final cause of the crash,” the two-page report said.

The plane crashed after circling for more than an hour in a holding pattern above the island of Kea, south-east of Athens International Airport.

Tsolakis said the investigation was making good progress. ”I am a conservative guy but I can judge it as a very fast moving one,” he said.

The full report on the Helios disaster is due in about six months. The government has promised to make its contents public.