IN THEIR drive for vindication, the relatives of the victims who perished aboard the Helios airliner are going ahead and suing manufacturers Boeing, one year after the worst aviation disaster in Cyprus’ history.
They are holding Boeing responsible for a string of build omissions, which they say contributed to the crash.
At least two of the alleged oversights involve the now-famous decompression warning signal.
The relatives say that, in the event of a problem, the alarm should have been configured to go off even before the plane reached an altitude of 10,000 feet. After that point, they say, it would be too late for pilots to react as they would come under the effects of hypoxia, or low oxygen in the blood.
Normal cabin pressurisation for a Boeing 737-300 is set at around 8,500 feet.
There is also the issue of the sound emitted for decompression being the same as that for the warning of a glitch in the positioning of the flaps.
Another omission concerns access to the cockpit. The relatives and their lawyers say Boeing should have made arrangements allowing other crew members to open the reinforced cockpit door from the outside, in case of an emergency, for example if something happened to the pilots.
The lawsuit has been filed in Illinois, the headquarters of Boeing.
Prodromos Prodromou, uncle of flight attendant Andreas Prodromou, yesterday told the Mail the first hearing in the case would take place tomorrow at a US federal court in Chicago.
He said Boeing would be filing a non-convenience forum motion, i.e. they would try to prevent the case from being heard in the United States, arguing that it should take place either in Greece or Cyprus. Compensation awarded in the US is typically much higher than in Cyprus.
A decision on whether the civil suit should take place in the United States should be out “by the end of the year”, Prodromou said.
“We have not determined the compensation amounts. This will come at a later stage.
“Bear in mind that 43 infants have been orphaned. Who will take care of them, their education?” mused Prodromou.
Meanwhile the liable airline, Helios, has been proposing out-of-court settlements. The company’s insurers have made an offer to the families of the seven Greek nationals who died in the crash.
Figures quoted in the media range from 500,000 to 1,000,000 euros, collectively.
The Cypriot relatives are not discussing such offers at the present time.
At any rate, the lawsuits do not rule out possible criminal proceedings against Helios and/or Boeing. This will largely depend on the findings of the Greek accident-investigating team, due out next month.
The probe will then be handed to a committee of inquiry here in Cyprus that will decide whether and who is liable for the accident.
Under the law, any criminal case must be brought up in Greece, in whose territory the accident occurred.
From the facts that have emerged in the year since the accident, it seems possible to build a tentative picture of what happened on the doomed flight: shortly after takeoff at 9am on the fateful day, two warnings – one for the decompression system, the other for the cooling system – were sounded almost simultaneously.
The warning horn sounded after the aircraft reached an altitude of 10,000 feet. The cabin decompression switch had been left on manual by ground crew during pre-flight checks, while it should have been set to automatic.
Still, the lapse could have been detected in time by the pilots had they properly scanned their gauges and carried out a checklist of components before takeoff. The aviators apparently did not do that, and the question remains why.
When the decompression alarm went off, the crew – who had assumed that the decompression switch was on auto – mistakenly took this for a glitch in the positioning of the flaps, because the sounds emitted in both cases are identical. As the aircraft climbed to 34,000 feet, both the pilots and passengers gradually suffered the effects of hypoxia: giddiness, loss of consciousness and finally deep slumber.
Chief air investigator Akrivos Tsolakis has also pointed out that the company’s manual for the Boeing 737-300 was vague. Instead of explicitly instructing ground technicians to reset the decompression switch to auto, the manual simply said that the switch should be set “to the previous position,” i.e. from manual to auto.
However, a Boeing pilot told the Mail that, while this was true, the manual explicitly states that when the compression alarm goes off in flight, this means a pressurisation problem; and when it sounds while the plane is on the ground, it indicates a takeoff configuration fault.
“There can be no misinterpretation as far as that’s concerned,” the source said.
He also thought that calls for Boeing to make the decompression alarm sound before 10,000 feet were “a bit far-fetched”.
“I don’t think it would make much of a difference. Normal cabin pressure is set at 8,500 to 8,800 feet, depending on the plane. With Boeing, in the case of loss of pressure, the alarm is configured to go off after the 10,000 feet mark. This is intended to give some leeway above the 8,500 mark, and is considered in the industry to be well within limits as far as safety goes.”
In other words, the source explained, the chances of a pilot passing out or losing his mental faculties between 8,500 to 10,000 feet were infinitesimal to non-existent.
The only serious defect the source could think of with the Boeing 737 was the absence of a visual indicator for loss of cabin pressure.
“There’s no red button flashing when that happens. You just hear a loud horn. But, again, pilots are trained to recognise this sound – they can’t miss it.
“If anything, it’s a design flaw. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a manufacturing error.”
But assuming the pilots somehow missed the decompression alarm, did they not notice the effects of hypoxia?
“Maybe, maybe not. What I can tell you is that no commercial airliner pilot receives training for low-oxygen conditions. They undergo simulated tests, yes, where they learn what to do in such an eventuality
“But they’re not placed in a real-life decompression chamber, like the ones you see in the movies.”
As far as the cockpit door safety measures were concerned, the source said that at least the senior flight attendant knows which code to enter on the keypad.
However, depending on airline policy, it was also possible for junior attendants to know the code. The source speculated that perhaps this was the case with steward Andreas Prodromou, who is believed to have tried to fly the plane when it was too late.
“I guess we’ll never know for sure. This is one of the grey areas,” he said.
