Doomed flight passed over Greek Airport
19.08.05
The Helios Airways plane that crashed near Athens airport, killing all 121 aboard, flew on autopilot to its Athens destination - but passed thousands of feet above the airport runway, the chief accident investigator said today. Flight ZU522 then turned toward the sea, flying in a holding pattern for more than an hour before changing course again and crashing into a mountain north of Athens.
Chief investigator, Akrivos Tsolakis, said an air traffic control diagram showed the plane had flown on automatic pilot from Cyprus to the Greek Athens Airport. But it was flying at 34,000 feet and turned south into a holding pattern over the island of Kea.
'What troubles us is that the automatic pilot was functioning up to a certain point, and then it was disengaged, possibly by human action,' Tsolakis said. He said it was unclear how or why the automatic pilot was disengaged.
Tsolakis' comments were the first official confirmation that the autopilot was disengaged after the plane flew over the Athens airport. They suggest that somebody tried to take control of the plane before it crashed.
A six-member team of coroners are conducting toxicology tests on some of the bodies to determine whether the 115 passengers and 6 crew might have inhaled something - possibly carbon monoxide - that rendered them unconscious. Results of those tests were expected by this week.
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