All 121 people aboard a Cypriot airliner died on Sunday after it smashed into a wooded hillside near Athens after air-force pilots said the crew of the Boeing 737 appeared ”doubled up” in the cabin.
In Larnaca, Cyprus, operator Helios Airways and a Greek government official in Athens said there were no survivors among the 115 passengers and six crew.
A Cypriot official said first indications from the Greek authorities are that the crash was not caused by a terrorist attack.
Police said the disaster could have been caused by a sudden failure in the pressurisation or air-conditioning system.
Firefighters searched for bodies among the smoking wreckage, which was scattered over a wide area, after water-dropping aircraft and helicopters were called in to extinguish a fierce blaze.
The Helios Airways twin-engine jet was about to land at Athens airport for a stopover on its journey from Lanarca in Cyprus to the Czech capital, Prague.
Czech Prime Minister Jiri Paroubek said 80 of the passengers were Greek schoolchildren returning from a holiday in Cyprus. But a fire-department spokesperson said: ”According to our information, there were a dozen children aboard.”
It is Greece’s worst air disaster since 1974, when a terrorist bomb aboard a TWA Boeing 707 caused it to crash in the Ionian sea with the loss of 88 lives.
Greek and Cypriot officials said communications with the Cypriot aircraft were suddenly lost.
Two air-force F16 fighters scrambled to investigate and found the Cypriot plane drifting above the Euboea peninsula north-east of Athens.
Iannis Pantazatos, who was in charge of the control tower at Athens International airport, said the air-force flyers ”saw the pilots doubled up in the cabin”.
Minutes later, the plane crashed at Varnava, a largely uninhabited area 40km north-east of Athens.
”An act of piracy is likely,” said a spokesperson for the Greek army, Gerassimos Kalpoyannakis. He said pilots of the two F16 fighters that were sent up to escort the airliner before the crash ”saw a situation that was not normal in the pilots’ cabin”.
In Nicosia, Minister of Communications Haris Thrassou said ”contact with the pilots and the control tower” was suddenly cut as the airliner approached Athens.
”Two fighter jets from the Greek air force escorted the plane, but unfortunately a few minutes later it crashed,” he added.
Government spokesperson Theodoros Roussopolos cautioned that the cause of the crash is unlikely to be known until investigators examine the plane’s flight recorder and cockpit voice recorder.
”We’re plumping for an accident, but cannot rule out other possibilities as long as the black boxes have not been analysed,” he said.
Helios Airways said it is ”unclear” what caused the crash.
A senior official at the public-order ministry, however, speculated that a sudden drop in cabin pressure could have caused the disaster.
The official said the pilot also had mentioned a problem with the plane’s air-conditioning system before losing contact.
But in Paris, accident investigator Francois Grangier said that a sudden loss of pressurisation would not have caused the plane to crash, nor would it have made the pilots immediately lose consciousness.
The plane would have been at fairly low altitude as it approached Athens airport, and Grangier said loss of pressurisation would not have had any effect on the aircraft’s structure. He said the pilots would also have had their own oxygen supply that would have enabled them to guide the plane to a landing.
”A pressurisation failure cannot bring down an aircraft,” he said. ”It is impossible that after a loss of pressure the plane is not recoverable.”
At Larnaca airport, weeping relatives of passengers on board sought news about the accident.
”It’s like sitting on hot coals. We’ve been here 90 minutes and no one has come here to tell us anything,” said Prodromos Prodomou.
Frustration mounted as rumours spread among the relatives, including one about a text message that had been sent from one passenger before the crash, saying the pilot had died and complaining of frigid temperatures on board.
The plane crashed in a sparsely inhabited area of brush and woodland.
Iannis Papagiorgiou, the mayor of the town of Grammatikos, near where the plane fell, said rescue workers were able to get easy access to the area, but officials said they found only widely scattered debris when they arrived.
Greek television broadcast footage of the smouldering wreckage of the plane, with its tail fin sticking out of the earth.
Helios Airways, established in 1999, is the first private airline in Cyprus. It had a fleet of four Boeing 737 jets and operates flights to London, Athens, Sofia, Dublin and Strasbourg in France, among other places.
The airline was bought last year by Libra Holidays, a Cyprus-based tour operator. — Sapa-AFP