An unidentified man struggled at the controls of a Cypriot airliner for 23 minutes in a desperate attempt to prevent the plane from crashing, Greek defence ministry officials said on Tuesday.
Two F-16 air force officers who were ordered to intercept a Helios Airways jetliner that failed to respond to Athens air traffic control on Sunday told how they saw a man trying to take command of the controls in the cockpit as they flew past the Boeing-737 at 11.42am.
At 12.05pm, after circling the Greek skies, the plane slammed into a mountain outside Athens, killing all 121 people, mostly Greek Cypriots, on board.
”We know that one of the stewards was a trained pilot,” said the Cypriot ambassador to Greece, Giorgos Georgiou.
The release of the two fighter pilots’ testimonies came as the mystery over the crash, Greece’s worse air disaster, deepened. Adding to growing questions over why the crew should lose control of the airliner so suddenly, Athens’ chief coroner also announced on Tuesday that autopsy results proved that the Boeing’s Greek Cypriot co-pilot, like all 26 passengers identified so far, was alive when the crash occurred.
”There are a lot of us here who think that aircraft was shot down by the F-16 fighters,” said Vasilli Tourkantonis, who runs the betting shop in Grammatikos.
The captain has still not been identified. Rescue workers scouring the hills of Grammatikos said his body could be among three believed to be trapped under the remains of the fuselage. Officials say the corpse could provide vital clues to the crash.
Hopes that the plane’s two black box recorders will shed light on the disaster appeared to suffer a setback when investigators said they had only found the exterior container of the cockpit voice recorder.
Kyriakos Pilavakis, a former chief mechanic for Helios Airways, told Greek state television that the plane had experienced pressurisation problems during a flight last December, causing the oxygen masks to deploy.
A C-130 military plane prepared to fly 45 bodies back to Cyprus on Tuesday — because of burns the rest can only be identified by DNA tests — and memorial services were held across the island and in Greece. – Guardian Unlimited Â