The Cypriot airline that owned the plane that crashed into a Greek mountain on Sunday, killing all 121 people on board, grounded all of its aircraft on Monday.
Helios Airways said no flights would be operating from Cyprus, despite earlier reports that it was operating a normal schedule.
Investigators believe that the cause of Sunday’s crash was a technical failure that resulted in a high-altitude decompression and a loss of oxygen in the aircraft. A transport official said all 115 passengers and six crew may have already been dead when the Boeing 737 crashed.
Following Helios’s decision to suspend its flights, a spokesperson for the Cypriot transport ministry spokesperson told Reuters: ”The company did this of its own volition after the strength of public opinion.”
Earlier on Monday, the pilots and crew of the budget airline refused to board planes in Cyprus.
The Cyprus News Agency reported the crew were taking action after it emerged that passengers had reported problems with air conditioning systems on Helios planes in the past.
About 100 passengers due to fly from Larnaca to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, then also refused to board the plane. ”First the crew refused to board, then the passengers,” reported the agency.
Investigators were examining the two black box recorders from flight ZU 255 on Monday to determine the cause of the crash, but officials said one could be so badly damaged it may not offer up any clues to the cause of the crash.
The Cypriot aircraft was en route from Larnaca, in Cyprus, to Prague, via Athens. It crashed about 40km north of Athens international airport around 12.03pm local time.
The two black boxes — a data and cockpit voice recorder — were recovered from the crash site and sent to air safety investigators in Paris. But the voice recorder was badly damaged by the crash and following fire on the aircraft.
Akrivos Tsolakis, the head of the Greek airline safety committee, said: ”It’s in a bad state and, possibly, it won’t give us the information we need. Both boxes will be sent to Paris where a French committee will help us and the foreign experts that are here to decode [them].”
Most of the bodies recovered from the crash were ”frozen solid” a source from the Greek ministry of defence told Reuters. Some of the bodies had also been burnt in the fire, but that was not believed to have been the cause of death.
It is believed that one passenger, Nikos Petridis, sent a text message to his cousin minutes before the crash. ”The pilot has turned blue. Cousin farewell, we’re freezing.”
The pilots of the airliner reported air conditioning system problems to Cypriot air traffic control about half an hour after takeoff. Within minutes of entering Greek air space, the plane lost all radio contact. Two Greek F-16 fighter jets were dispatched soon afterward.
”When a pilot has no communication with the control tower, the procedure dictates that other planes must accompany and help the plane land. Unfortunately, it appeared that the pilot was already dead as was, possibly, everyone else on the plane,” said the Cypriot transport minister, Haris Thrasou.
A government spokesperson, Theodoros Roussopoulos, said the jet pilots reported that they could not see the captain in the cockpit; the co-pilot was slumped over his seat and oxygen masks dangled inside the cabin.
The jet pilots also saw two people possibly trying to take control of the plane but it was unclear if they were crew or passengers, said Roussopoulos. A spokesperson for Helios said the plane appeared to be on automatic pilot when it crashed.
A system failure should have left the cabin crew with a back-up system, but the Greek media speculated that toxic gas from possible faulty air conditioning could have incapacitated the two pilots.
”The crew could have been overcome very, very quickly if all the systems failed. It may have taken less than 20 seconds,” said David Kaminski-Morrow, deputy news editor of internet news service Air Transport Intelligence.
Relatives of those who died in the crash started to gather in Athens on Monday at a central morgue to identify the bodies.
The official passenger list released by the airline states that the German pilot and an Armenian family of four were among the 121 killed in the crash.
There were also 12 Greeks killed and the remaining 104 victims were Cypriots.
Earlier reports that 48 children on board had died may not be correct. Vicky Xitas, commercial manager for Helios, said the airline only had 10 people up to the age of 12 listed on its reservation system. – Guardian Unlimited Â