Families of Helios victims call for investigation results
THE HELIOS victims’ relatives committee yesterday called on President Tassos Papadopoulos to immediately assemble a committee to investigate the air disaster of August 14.
Last August, Cyprus saw the worst air disaster in the island’s history when Helios Airways flight ZU522 crashed into a mountain side in Grammatikos, Greece killing all 121 passengers and crew members on board.
Speaking to reporters yesterday, the head of the committee, Nicolas Yiasoumis, said the President and the Ministry of Communications already had in their possession the details of the investigation conducted by the Greek investigating team and that a committee should now be made to find bring those responsible for the crash to justice.
“We believe that all the necessary information is in the hands of the President and the relative authorities on the island. It is therefore imperative that the investigation moves along because whereas some people may say that time can heal wounds, in our case time is opening up our wounds.”
Yiasoumis, who lost his brother, sister-in-law and their two children in the crash, then reiterated the comments of the chief investigator of the crash, Akrivos Tsolakis, who had recently stated that President Papadopoulos had been informed about “everything”.
As a result of the crash, 47 children, of whom 26 were under 18, were orphaned.
“We hope that this committee would not just be comprised of lawyers and law experts that would only observe the legal aspect of the investigation but also of other experts such as mechanics”, said Yiasoumis.
But Yiasoumis later told the Cyprus Mail that there was something else troubling the relatives. Helios Airways had reportedly hired a senior adviser who had been previously aiding the police in the early investigations of the crash.
“During the early days after the crash, the Attorney General and the police had appointed two advisers to aid them with their preliminary investigations and questioning of various people. We later discovered that one of those advisers has now been hired by Helios Airways to act as an adviser for their engineering department.”
He added, “We are obviously very concerned about this appointment because we believe that Helios Airways could have details of the investigation beforehand with the appointment of this person.
“We are also a little stunned that the Attorney General didn’t instruct which ever adviser he had used during that time not to take up a position with the airline under investigation.”
Helios Airways spokesman Nicos Anastassiades was unavailable for comment.
Meanwhile, Tsolakis and his 12-member investigative team will be reconstructing the sequence of events that led to the crash of the fateful flight by staging some of the pressurisation problems it experienced on an identical passenger plane of Olympic Airways.
The flight number will be OA121 in memory of the 121 victims who lost their lives on that fateful day last August.
It would be the first time this has been attempted in the history of air disasters and the flight reconstruction will take place this Monday.
Speaking to the Guardian newspaper, Tsolakis said, “We will stage some pressurisation problems although the experiment will be based at zero risk. We will do what has never been done before in the annals of air accidents.
“We will take off from Cyprus at exactly the same time as the Helios flight, fly exactly the same route to Athens, simulate all the technical failures, and have an F-16 fighter plane follow us as happened on the day.”
He added, “This reproduction, we are sure, will answer all the remaining questions that we have about one of the most complicated accidents in aviation history.”
A pressurisation valve left in manual mode is believed to be the key to the cause of the crash. Experts believe that German pilot Hans Jeurgen Merten had apparently not reset the valve to automatic after pre-flight tests on the plane. Both the pilot and co-pilot Pambos Charalambous are then thought to have mistakenly left the knob in manual mode despite having four chances to correct it as they went through their pre-takeoff cockpit drills.
Both the pilots and most of the passengers are then believed to have lost consciousness when the aircraft climbed on autopilot to 34,000 feet and the aircraft then flew unpiloted before running out of fuel and crashing just outside of Athens.
DNA examinations in the cockpit also lead investigators to believe that 25-year-old steward Andreas Prodromou, who was also a trainee pilot, tried to take control of the aircraft ten minutes before it crashed.
