AS CAMERAS rolled and mikes were switched on, the committee of inquiry into the Helios air disaster went into full swing this week. In the space of just a few days, it has become something of a parody of the OJ Simpson trial, though without the live coverage bit. Just as well. The hearings have stirred up so much passions and anger that perhaps the media should have been left outside altogether.
Take an airline official by the name of Chrystalla Asprou, who told a wide-eyed audience that staff at Helios Airways were under immense strain from their superiors and were being forced to work extensive hours without being paid overtime.
Popular conclusion: working conditions at the airline were abominable, leading to fatigue and mistakes – hence an accident was waiting to happen, and it did on August 14, 2005.
Asprou informed the committee: “Mr Pantazis [former Helios director] was very demanding and put pressure on employees to work extra hours without being given overtime. We would go to work at 9am and not know what time we would be finishing work.”
Can anyone say ‘grandstanding’? Asprou may have had a legitimate gripe with her company, but how relevant are her allegations to the immediate causes of the crash?
Ever since the hearings got underway, it would seem that everyone who has a gripe with his or her employer has come out of the woodwork with their own tale, which is then endowed with a veneer of absolute gravitas.
News-wise, it’s the biggest story in recent years. Networks and papers can afford to be sensationalistic – after all, you have the victims’ relatives behind you. You can’t go wrong.
But have the hearings and the media coverage really served the cause of the bereaved?
Let’s look at another example:
Marios Frangiskos, a Helios employee who was the last person to have contact with the pilots before they passed out, testified that just four minutes after takeoff, the German pilot, Hans Jurgen Mertin, had contacted him and told him, “Take-Off Configuration Warning”, before telling him that he awaited further instructions on what to do.
In a matter-of-fact way, Frangiskos next stated that he didn’t know what to do at the time, because the appropriate official was not present and had been on night duty.
He added that he had tried to call the appropriate official on his mobile phone, but there was no answer. He called the plane back six minutes later, but there was no answer from the cockpit.
Hearing this, the victims’ relatives were outraged. On the evening of Frangiskos’ testimony, news
bulletins reported this as a “shocking admission” by the man that he was not a qualified engineer – in short, that he was not the right man for the job.
Predictably, this information was used to feed the ruckus that chaos reigns in the aviation industry – that even people without expertise are allowed to man crucial posts.
That may be so, but not in this case. Indeed, the whole story was blown out of proportion because it was taken out of context.
Frangiskos, the Mail has been reliably informed, was not supposed to be a technician in the first place. His job description is ‘duty officer’. A duty officer is the person who maintains radio contact (usually on VHF) with the plane, sort of a receptionist if you will. If the pilot wishes to report something, he calls the duty officer, who in turn notifies the appropriate person. Which is exactly what Frangiskos did.
Nowhere are duty officers obliged to have technical proficiency about planes. That much is true. In fact, such a person might not even know “how many wings there are on a plane,” as one Boeing pilot, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Mail.
It is up to the individual airlines whether they want to keep engineers on duty round the clock. If they do not have the resources to do so, engineers should be on call or readily reachable.
Another possible fallacy: stewardess Fanoula Savvidou told the committee that the doomed aircraft had experienced some problems during a flight to London just one day before the crash.
She said ice had accumulated on the cabin door, adding that passengers had been complaining that they were cold, forcing the pilot to switch on the heating, adding that a funny noise could be heard during take off and landing.
Savvidou added she had often heard of complaints about the specific aircraft.
The implication here was that the aircraft components tended to overheat, forcing the crew to
turn off the heating. Again, the impression was given that the airline failed to act on a nagging, and possible dangerous, glitch.
Yet the same source told the Mail that this sort of incident, with dropping temperatures on board, was quite common.
“The air conditioning system inside a plane is regulated by airflow. If it is too cold, the pilot turns on the heating. If it is too hot, he turns it off. It’s just like in your house.
“As far as the ice on the cabin door, this is caused by condensation of residual moisture on the fuselage in the freezing temperatures of high altitudes, and is not necessarily abnormal. It depends. We need to know the specifics.”
Another aviator, also speaking anonymously, shared the view that popular misconceptions have been allowed to run rampant.
But he went a step further:
“For a year now, the victims’ relatives have been led to believe that they will be handed someone to hang. But watching the proceedings this week, I lost count of how many times gibberish was served to the committee.
“Finding out who’s guilty is a complicated business. In my view, a lot of people were to blame for this calamity. There was a whole chain of events. But no matter how you slice it, it all starts with the pilots. Then come the engineers. Least of all is Civil Aviation or [Transport Minister] Thrassou.
“That’s not to say that aviation authorities in Cyprus are perfect. Far from it. To be frank, they’re a shambles. The popular view that they’re operating on barebones, doing just enough, is right on the money. But, strictly speaking, is that what caused the accident?”
The Mail asked the source to comment on the sequence of events on the fateful day. The accepted wisdom is that problems began with mistakes on the ground that were subsequently not dealt with in the air. 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, this 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.
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, or low oxygen in the blood: giddiness, loss of consciousness and finally deep slumber.
“Whatever happened,” the source said, “I feel the pilots committed an unforgivable mistake. During training, it’s drilled into us pilots that whenever we hear an alarm, we should immediately level the plane or drop to below 10,000 feet. Whatever the Helios pilots thought the problem was, you just don’t troubleshoot while you’re still climbing.
“To me, the inquiry has so far been dealing with trivial ma
tters, to put it delicately. Some of the things mentioned at the committee are downright ludicrous. I wonder, can justice be served this way?
“One thing that has bothered me all along is the composition of the so-called committee of inquiry. How can one man be a committee? If my English is correct, a committee should consist of at least two persons. After all, there’s a common-sense reason for that: it is more difficult to mislead, deceive, put pressure on, even bribe, two or three people than it is one.
“I don’t mean that this has happened. All I’m saying is that, in the world annals of committees, Cyprus has to be the only place where one guy is the committee.
“If they wanted to do a proper job, they should have appointed five persons, at the very least, including aviation experts. [Committee chairman Panayiotis] Kallis may know the law, but he’s no expert on airplanes.
“It is beyond me why anyone should accept such a job. There’s too much heat on Kallis, even without the witch-hunt. But what really gets me is that the victims’ relatives have gone along with the establishment of this bogus committee.
“All these things have contributed to the inquiry degenerating into a public court. The scenes taking place – such as relatives beating their breasts and screaming – remind you of ancient Greek tragedies. Can you blame these people? Of course not. Their pain is being exploited. It
does make for good television, though.”
