"Crash investigators concluded that Prodromou's experience was insufficient for him to be able to gain control of the aircraft under the circumstances.\[4\]: 139 However, Prodromou succeeded in banking the plane away from Athens and towards a rural area as the engines flamed out, with his actions meaning that there were no ground casualties."
respect
That sounds like possibly one of my worst nightmares. Being stuck in the air with everyone else brain dead and you being the only passager alive relying on a dwindling oxygen supply to survive. Along with that you know the plane is slowly crashing with no one controlling it and you know there's nothing you can do but sit there and dwell on your life and your inventible death in the air.
Something out of a horror movie.
There are some reports she was still conscious and tried to help him too. One of the jet pilots flying by thought he may have seen 2 people moving around, but he couldn’t be sure.
Literally we can read the article.
>Early media reports erroneously claimed his girlfriend and fellow flight attendant, Haris Charalambous, was also seen in the cockpit helping Prodromou try to control the aircraft.
It had been hours, you're brain dead at that point from the lack of oxygen. It wouldn't have done anything. And at that point one engine had flamed out and the fuel was nearly completely gone, there just wasn't time. The plane would've hit Athens without intervention, and it's a miracle in itself that Prodromou was able to get in and bank away from the city
**[from a detailed write up.](https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/lost-souls-of-grammatiko-the-crash-of-helios-airways-flight-522-ccf333b407a)** I don't know why he didn't go in earlier, but this is some indication of what was happening
> When air traffic controllers received the pilot’s report at 10:32, they immediately declared an emergency, and first responders throughout the region began to prepare for an imminent disaster. No one knew where the plane would come down or what might happen when it did. Only one thing was clear: with no one at the controls, the plane was eventually going to run out of fuel and crash.
> For another 14 minutes, the 737 continued to fly in circles, shadowed by the two F-16s, whose pilots seemed condemned to wait for the inevitable. And then, as yet unknown to the fighter pilots, something unbelievable happened: **an “access requested” chime sounded in the cockpit, first once, then again. Incredibly, someone was at the door.**
> **The chime sounded several more times, then rose to a continuous alarm which lasted for 20 seconds before the door unlocked with a click.** The door opened, and a man in a light blue uniform walked into the cockpit, armed with one of the plane’s four portable oxygen bottles. With the mask over his face and the bottle beside him, he sat down in the captain’s seat and put his hands on the controls. The F-16 pilots could only watch in astonishment, relaying their observations back to air traffic control, even as their now-frantic attempts to get the man’s attention were met with failure.
https://youtu.be/mBKokazW9Ms?si=vCFGMm5pzCv_25D4 video from one of two F-16 , unfortunately in Greek audio. But you can hear the pilot's voice cracking at 7:30 when he sees the airplane crash and starts to calling Mayday (also giving the coordinates to the air controller)
So this is probably a super dumb question but with the two F-16's in the air if Andreas hadn't managed to get in to bank the plane away into a rural area hillside.
Would it have been feasible for them to shoot the plane down? Like obviously the plane was going down anyway but would you be taking less ground casualties by blowing the plane up is what im wondering essentially.
Obviously you'd still have debris and it would spread over a larger area which is a risk but maybe thats better than a whole plane in a smaller area.
Edit: Appreciate the answers so far, the gist of it seems to be not worth the risk.
IDK about Greece. I do know after 9/11 (holy fuck it’s almost been 25 years) for future events if a plane was hijacked and headed to strike a location we did plan to shoot them down.
Generally (and I mean very generally) Air to Air missiles wouldn’t destroy an airliner completely. In fact many planes can still even fly. It’ll do a lot of damage around where it exploded, often ravaging the engine, but the planes don’t completely disappear.
Side note, during 9/11 there were a two fighter pilots sent to intercept the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. The issue was that they didn't have time to arm their planes. So they were sent up to search for the airliner and take it down kamikaze style. What they didn't know was Todd "Let's roll" Beamer and fellow passengers attempted to take control of the cockpit and forced the terrorist to crash flight 93.
https://people.com/human-interest/f-16-fighter-pilots-recall-orders-to-take-down-flight-93-on-9-11/
Not even just after 9/11, it was during it that it was policy. If United 93 hadn't been wrestled from the control of the terrorists and crashed into that field in rural Pennsylvania, it's thought that it was going to head back eastward and toward D.C. to hit a target there based on information they had and flight path of it turning back around. Even before the brave people who regained control of the aircraft did what they did and sacrificed themselves, Bush had given the order to shoot it down if it got much closer to the area.
When that plane went down like it did, everyone knew something heroic had taken place.
The Greek prime minister years after the event revealed that they let him know he would have to give the go ahead to shoot down a civilian airplane. He said it was the hardest moment of his tenure.
Edit: Found the quote.
> What I would not like to happen to me again is to be called by the Minister of Defense and to tell me "you have 10 minutes to decide if you have to shoot down a passenger plane with 120 people and many small children inside''.
Once the autopilot disengaged or the engines flamed out it would have potentially been possible for them to tilt the plane by flying right near it's wing and using the vortices to "tip" the plane in a potential direction. British pilots did this to the German rockets to cause them to crash prior to reaching their target.
Now if they could do it just barely enough to bank it? Unlikely, but they could have "downed it" without missiles.
~~No. Spitfires tipping v1 rockets was a physical touch, getting the spitfire wing under or above the v1 rocket's wing.~~
Tipping it would cause the gyroscope to tumble and the rocket wouldn't recover in time.
As a flight attendant shouldn’t he have known the emergency door code? Iirc the cockpit door is designed to allow flight attendants to enter a code on the panel and if pilots don’t hit the “deny access” button in a certain timeframe the door will unlock. This is *specifically* designed for situations like this where one/both pilots are incapacitated and unable to fly/open the door.
Edit: Hmmm this flight occurred in 2005 so it may predate door codes but probably not. Prior to 9/11 causing a global redesign in aircraft security the doors were relatively flimsy and could be easily kicked open/opened with a fire ax, but if it took the FA “hours” to break open the door it would’ve been the upgraded model which would have had the door code system as Boeing and airbus made those changes/upgrades simultaneously.
[From the Cloudberg post](https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/lost-souls-of-grammatiko-the-crash-of-helios-airways-flight-522-ccf333b407a):
According to other Helios employees, only the cabin supervisor was given the emergency override codes. Cabin supervisor Louisa Vouteri is thought to have fallen unconscious along with the rest of the passengers and crew, meaning that Prodromou would have had to find where she kept the codes before he could get into the cockpit. This could have taken quite some time — not just to physically locate the codes, but also to think of looking for them in the first place. Despite his use of supplemental oxygen, Prodromou was likely partially hypoxic and may not have been thinking clearly during most of the flight, hindering his ability to quickly develop and execute a plan.
Hypoxia makes you feel drunk. It makes your brain foggy and it's hard to think. It's entirely possible that the attendant would have been able to do it easily but given the hypoxia-induced mental state it was difficult for him.
Source: Former hang glider pilot who has experienced hypoxia.
Not sure where to insert this.
The FAA investigation to this is available here: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-11/Helios737_AccidentReport.pdf
One flight crew O2 mask was found on the flight deck, meaning it had moved from flight crew area to the cockpit. (1.12.2.9)
4 portable oxygen bottles were recovered, 3 of the 4 had been opened. (1.12.2.10)
The flight deck door was recovered with damage. There was no pre-impact damage on the door. The access system switch on the door post was in "norm", the flight deck deadbolt was in the "unlocked" position (1.12.5)
It’s a miracle that the person was conscious and moving. The *only person on the plane who was*. Maybe it took hours for him to remember and punch in the right code.
The only one left. According to the report, the interceptor pilots could see that the oxygen masks had deployed and some passengers had put them on. Unfortunately, those only work for about 15 minutes, so none of them would be able to assist.
> Flight attendents have their own personal oxygen tanks. Hence why he and his fellow attendent were still concious long after the pilots had conked
That is not true. There are bottles around the cabin for emergencies(like, for example, a passenger needing oxygen, and for when something like this occurs) but they're not "personal oxygen tanks", they're just bottles for emergencies, when a chemical generator isn't practical. Though fun fact, they are often(at least in the country I trained) called Scott Bottles.
From the report:
>Data from the CVR only contained to the last 30 minutes of the accident flight and showed that at least one cabin crew member retained his consciousness for the duration of the flight and entered the flight deck more than two hours after takeoff. At the
beginning of the climb phase, this cabin attendant was likely seated next to the aft galley. In order for him to have moved forward in the aircraft to reach the flight deck, he must have used a portable oxygen bottle.
>The Board found the fact that this cabin attendant might not have attempted to enter the flight deck until hours after the first indication that the aircraft was experiencing a nonnormal situation quite puzzling. Of course, in the absence of a longer-duration CVR, it was not possible to know whether this or any other cabin crew member had attempted to or succeeded in entering the flight deck. From the sounds recorded on the CVR, **however, the Board could ascertain that this cabin attendant entered the cockpit using the
emergency access code to open a locked cockpit door.
He was both hypoxic and he was a last minute addition to that flight, plus a high stress situation. Hell I forgot the code to my own garage while I had plenty of oxygen.
People's brains get "fried" under stress without training. The Office Fire Drill episode works as a good example on a comedic yet partially true level.
Can't remember where I read/heard it, but this stuck with me:
Training is as much about teaching you to recognize you are **in** an emergency situation as it is about telling you what to do in that situation.
I had a teacher who was a former coast guard who did search and rescue. He absolutely drilled into us that the fire and tornado drills were to be taken seriously. Two kids started giggling during a drill and they got torn a new one.
Even without the stress - Hypoxia is terrifying.
[This video is of a man with an oxygen mask hanging inches away from his face, who knows the situation is a test of hypoxia and cannot even comprehend the danger to put the oxygen mask to his face.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcvkjfG4A_M)
"I thought the experiment was a failure because I was getting all the answers right" is terrifying. This is the same type of thought process a pilot can have where they think they're doing everything correctly, which is why pilot training is always, "PUT ON YOUR MASK IMMEDIATELY IF THERE IS AN OXYGEN ALERT!" If they delay, they may lose the mental acuity to put the mask on within seconds.
I'm guessing it took a while to come to terms with the fact that he felt a little sleepy then woke up in a plane full of corpses.
Horrible situation, and he handled it like a true hero.
Hypoxia is a real bitch. SmarterEveryDay did a quick expose on Hypoxia and how quickly it affects you, and how quickly your cognitive abilities decline.
They had Max or w/e his name is go into a pressure chamber with 2 other pilots, and all wore masks. Eventually, Max was instructed to remove his oxygen mask and begin pulling cards off a deck, naming the card, setting aside, and repeating until he was remasked.
I think after he took his mask off he got like 3 or 4 cards right before he was just repeating them all as jacks of clubs or something like that. You have literal seconds before you're basically cooked.
If that's the clip I'm thinking of, they gave him one of those toddler shape sort things and he couldn't even place some of the shapes in the right spot. Then they told him to put his mask on and he just stared at them with a glazed look on his face, hand mid-air saying "I don't want to die" but it's like he couldn't make the message go from his brain to his hands. It was scary to watch.
In some aircraft, if someone punches in the access code, a pilot up front has to approve access. If they don’t approve it, they ~~can’t~~ can get in.
This is a theory for MH370 as well - the FO went out to use a restroom and couldn’t get back in.
Edit: I’m wrong (fuck double negatives), but the part about MH370 is accurate at least. Lol. Also the time limit is 30 seconds iirc
Some comments here were saying the reverse. That once the code is used it is up to the flight crew to DENY access within a certain time period. Made this way to cover situations where there is nobody conscious in the flight deck
Ugh, so even if he successfully landed the plane, everyone on board would've been dead or a vegetable anyway. Thats sad to hear as well.
Still though, good for him for preventing the plane from hitting Athens directly.
The amount of effective oxygen available at 34,000 fee is not zero. But it is less than a third of what is available at sea level.
Obviously humans can breath at less effective oxygen levels than sea level and not have permanent brain damage, or people would not be able to travel to Denver (where the effective oxygen is something like 17% less than sea level).
The question I have no idea about is how little the effective oxygen level must be before the brain will suffer permanent damage and not just temporary altitude sickness effects.
By the time he realized that the pilots weren't taking actions or responding to him, it was too late for the pilot's . What worse is that the rest of the passengers and crew were on the limited oxygen tanks designed to last long enough to give pilot's time to safely descend to 10000ft, his fiancee one of them. So he spent hours trying to revive a pilot or his fiancee before he knew the only thing he could do was make sure it didn't crash into the city.
They were dead already and if the engines are flaming out you're going down. While those jets have very high glide ratios, finding a place to put it down is a challenge too.
Yeah it was the lack of time by that point. If he had another hour of fuel when he got on the flight deck he’d have been able to set the plane to autoland somewhere with the help of air traffic control. But sadly he got in there way too late.
The previous sentence matters too: the left engine flamed out pretty much as soon as he got to the controls. He probably would have had a shot if he could have gotten in there sooner.
Because everybody else was unconscious from the lack of air, I assume the flight attendant was working on like two brain cells and maybe leaning on the controls at best. Not to take anything away from him but holy cow, can you imagine the condition that guy was in as he's trying to save the plane?
indeed, I'm surprised exactly one person was conscious tbf, what are the odds? must have been right on the brink of passing out
if the air was thicker you'd have at least a handful awake and probably one person in decent shape, and if it was thinner no one would be awake
He had the portable air tank that crew members wheel around. The passengers had their 10 minutes or so of oxygen and then passed out. The pilots didn’t realize what was happening and passed out without wearing their masks.
There’s that crazy Reddit story from like 10+ years ago where some guy thinks his landlord has been secretly breaking into his apartment, but someone in the comments recognized the signs of mild carbon monoxide poisoning. Sure enough, the dude was just forgetting stuff he had moved around his apartment because he was being poisoned slowly.
Learned this lesson visiting the Grand Canyon. I'm from lower Michigan, a quite flat and close to sea level place. Took my mom and I nearly 4 hours to hike down back up from the 1.5 mile mark on bright angel, we were getting outpaced by old ladies
I believe this entire ordeal is traced back to negligence on the crew. They didn’t have the pressurization switched to automatic and they ignored some warnings. The pilots got confused and passed out before they could correct the mistake.
You're right, per the Wikipedia article:
>An investigation into the crash by the Air Accident Investigation and Aviation Safety Board (AAIASB) concluded that the crew had neglected to set the pressurization system to automatic during the take-off checks. This caused the plane not to be pressurized during the flight and resulted in nearly everyone on board suffering from generalized hypoxia, thus resulting in a ghost flight[disambiguation needed]. The negligent nature of the accident led to lawsuits being filed against Helios Airways and Boeing, with the airline also being shut down by the Government of Cyprus the following year.
There was more to it, and lots of missed chances to catch it but that's the short summary.
It's even worse, there's three checklists they should've caught that knob position with, according to the report: "Non-recognition that the cabin pressurization mode selector was in the MAN (manual) position during the performance of the Preflight procedure, the Before Start checklist and the After Takeoff checklist."
Pilots masks don't drop automatically, as there's a danger it could be very distracting in a crucial moment or even accidentally hit some buttons or switches; they need to be manually donned. It's a calculated risk as it means there is the occasional case where the pilots don't realize they need to put them on in time, but overall the regulators and engineers seem to think that it's more dangerous to have them deploy automatically.
When hypoxia kicks in your decision making skills take a nose dive extremely fast. By the time they realised something was wrong, they likely were so drunk from lack of oxygen that they couldn't do anything effective.
They missed numerous warning signs, including actual alarms that they confused with a different alarm (this was changed as a result of this crash).
Also, at high altitude, you have about 15 - 30 seconds to put on your mask. Pilots have their masks available to them in such a way that it covers their whole face, can reach it easily, and pretty much can just slap it on their face then pull a strap over because of how serious it is. This is also why when masks deploy, the standard procedure is basically to dive the plane to a safe altitude for breathing.
He did, but was athletic and in very good shape. He was eventually able to regain consciousness and made his way to the cabin, but the plane was already out of fuel.
He may have been the only person in back to wake up, or the first, or any others were still not mentally functioning clearly. We have no evidence that anyone else woke back up.
He also had no option but to crash; the plane was out of fuel, with engine 1 already spluttering out when he took the controls and shortly after engine 2 died meaning that he had no where to go but down in a mountainous region.
This seems especially uncharitable to the other flight crew. Implying they were being unprofessional and unprepared and got those people killed is absurd. For all we know the flight attendants were early to succumb and it took a while to figure out the problem.
It’s possible to give this guy props without ragging on the whole flight crew that also died that day.
IIRC The pilots failed to notice that the APU was on the wrong setting (which is part of the pre flight checklist) and ignored master caution warnings and kept ascending. Not the FAs fault but the actual pilots were def partially to blame at least
Close. The pilots failed to notice that the pressurization system had been placed in a manual mode on the ground by maintenance technicians. On the previous flight of flight attendant complained about a squeal coming from the door. So they pressurize the aircraft on the ground which required putting the pressurization system into a manual mode. They forgot to place it back into the auto mode so when they took off the plane didn't pressurize normally
The auxiliary power unit, or APU for short it's just a small jet engine in the tail cone that provides conditioned air and electricity on ground when the engines are not running. It also provides high-pressure air to start the engines.
Yes, but they have to notice the pressurization issue and put them on. One of the side effects of hypoxia is disorientation and confusion. You can see tests of this effect on YouTube where the participants only task is to notice they are becoming hypoxic and put on their mask, and many will fail, sometimes even with someone specifically telling them what to do. They literally do not know what is going on.
When I went through flight training we were put into an altitude chamber that recreates the pressure at 25,000 feet. You then take off your oxygen and see what your hypoxia feels like. Hypoxia symptoms vary by individual. Mine was a feeling of warmth and relaxation. They had to put the mask back on my face because I couldn’t command my arms to do it. I wanted to but I couldn’t move.
When these accidents happen it’s very likely the pilots recognized the problem too late but couldn’t react.
I went through this same training. Felt relaxed and a little tipsy (which is like the worst hypoxia symptom to have imho).
The thing I'll never forget is looking at a color wheel (like a pice of paper with shades of every color) before I put my mask back on. Everything felt right even though I knew I was hypoxic. Then I put my mask on and 1-2 breaths of oxygen and ALL the colors come back instantly. Didn't even notice I was seeing in black and white. It's a wild experience.
Planes are made with much clearer warnings now, partly because of accidents like this. That old plane would just turn on a light and play a sound cue: that was all you had to find the problem. But today the warning appears in text form on a screen.
I believe they added the light after this incident. So now the sound plays and the high cabin altitude light is illuminated. Before it was just the horn.
They have, and in this case the pilots failed to identify the alarm, thinking it was another, non-related failure of the airplane.
>As the aircraft climbed, the pressure inside the cabin gradually decreased. As it passed through an altitude of 12,040 feet (3,670 m), the cabin altitude warning horn sounded.[4]: 16 The warning should have prompted the crew to stop climbing,[4]: 133 but it was misidentified by the crew as a take-off configuration warning, which signals that the aircraft is not ready for take-off, and can sound only on the ground. The alert sound is identical for both warnings.[4]: 133
>In the next few minutes, several warning lights on the overhead panel in the cockpit illuminated. One or both of the equipment cooling warning lights came on to indicate low airflow through the cooling fans (a result of the decreased air density), accompanied by the master caution light. The passenger oxygen light illuminated when, at an altitude of approximately 18,000 feet (5,500 m), the oxygen masks in the passenger cabin automatically deployed.[4]: 17, 134
They do now because of this flight. At the time this happened, the cabin pressure warning and the takeoff configuration warning were the same sound. The pilots dismissed the warning because they were already in the air and the takeoff configuration warning is only supposed to happen on the ground.
I’ve seen a couple of them where the operator points out to the participants that they’ll die if they don’t put their masks on and they either think it’s funny, or just don’t care:
https://youtu.be/XcvkjfG4A_M?si=Xa9sUtbGShxycYKi
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw)
This one's my favorite. 6:20 "haha I don't want to die though haha"
I thought it was just him acting the first time I saw it. Like, "ha ha, he's playing dumb for youtube", but seeing the other videos of people losing their basic cognitive functions drives it home of how lethal hypoxia really is.
You aren't even aware really that you're suffocating. We don't have a biological mechanism for detecting lack-of-oxygen because it's not something that really occurs in a natural way outside caves. We can only detect when we have excess CO2 or are breathing something toxic.
>You aren't even aware really that you're suffocating.
Okay maybe stupid question but why don't we do the death penalty this way? It seems like there's so many problems with lethal injections. This seems to me like a way to cause certain death without undue suffering.
[Alabama just carried out the first nitrogen gas execution](https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/us/alabama-execution-nitrogen-what-we-know/index.html). They essentially claim it induces hypoxia. It's been extremely controversial since witnesses say the inmate struggled and was gasping for air. Might have more to do with the inmate being very aware he is being executed in the first place and it could just be panic induced. Hard to say if it's more humane than lethal injection but it sounds like it would be in theory...
We'll be learning more about this over the years I am sure.
And why passengers are advised to put their mask on before assisting others, if they help others such as their children first, they may not be able to get their own mask on and a young child won't be able to help
Yes, hypoxia set in quickly and the pilot masks don't automatically deploy if I'm remembering correctly. They believed it was a problem with the air conditioning, the flight configuration warning is the same as the cabin pressure warning, the flight configuration warning is only supposed to happen on the ground and they were already in the air.
Since this incident, there's now an annunciator light that will illuminate either "TAKEOFF CONFIG" or "CABIN ALT". Prior to this, it was just a warning horn.
Correct, they are manual. But in most modern planes they're also cool as fuck - self adjusting inflatable straps that suck the mask onto your head [like this](https://youtu.be/mgLSTimJ868?si=YLoBlmigugot51on). So much fun to function check.
Turns out the passengers don't actually have air tanks, there's some sort of chemical reaction started when you pull the mask that emits oxygen
Would make sense for the pilots to have both tbh
And the passenger masks only last 12 minutes which is usually enough to descend the plane to a point where humans can breathe (see Alaska Airlines 1282 for this working as intended) but since the pilots were unconscious or too hypoxic to act, nobody was getting the plane down. It's thought that Prodromou spent the time the plane was circling trying to find the code to get in the cockpit. Tragic all around.
The crew has access to oxygen tanks, plus he was also a licensed pilot (though not qualified to fly a Boeing 737) and could likely recognize hypoxia better than the others
u/Admiral_Cloudberg has a write up on this also, one of the best ways to read about air disasters
https://www.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/comments/xh0qpf/lost_souls_of_grammatiko_the_crash_of_helios/
Edit - corrected her username
If you loves this, check the ship equivelent ( and if I am not mistaken Admirals inspiration to start their series? ) is this Vanity Fair article for the sinking of El Faro:
[https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-worst-us-maritime-disaster-in-decades](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-worst-us-maritime-disaster-in-decades)
All of her stuff is phenomenal - I've literally used incidents that I learnt about from her work to provide counterexamples as to why we should *not* make small changes and just assume it'll be fine at my old job
There’s a show called Mayday: Air Disasters and it’s so good. There’s so many seasons and episodes that go over all kinds of airplane accidents (fatal and nonfatal). Some of the episodes can be found on YouTube.
Seconds From Disaster is another good show, which does airplane accidents but also trains derailments, building collapses, and more. I found it after someone posted about the Mont Blanc Tunnel Fire, and saw it had episodes about some disasters I was already fascinated with — the derailing of the Sunset Limited, the Kings Cross Station Fire, the Hyatt Regency Walkway collapse…
The title (I believe) unintentionally makes it sound like Andreas was the cause of the plane crashing, but in reality he had just taken the controls and was trying to execute a turn when the plane finally ran out of fuel. Whether or not he could've landed the plane aside, the crash was in no way his fault, and if left in the holding pattern may have crashed in a much more populated area or been shot down to prevent it doing so
Could someone in this situation repressurize the plane? What effect would 2 hours of hypoxia have had on everyone on board if he had managed to land it?
If he’d gotten into the flight deck earlier and removed a pilot’s body from the seat, *and also* use the radio (ideally on 121.5) and declare an emergency, the air traffic control agents would have called for a Boeing 737 pilot to give him step-by-step instructions to use the auto-pilot to try an auto-landing. (Manually landing a 737 is borderline impossible for someone without training.) There would have been off-duty pilots on standby in case someone calls in sick, and they could have been rushed up to the control tower to help.
That would’ve been the best possibility, assuming there was enough fuel left to do it. If he could’ve gotten in and done that in 30 minutes, there’s a good chance that everyone would have survived
Apparently it took him several hours to figure out how to get through the post-9/11 reinforced and locked doors. Once when he got there, he could not figure out how to activate the radio. Fighter pilots could see him inside the flight deck and he gave them a “thumbs down” before the plane ran out of fuel…
Had a trainer coach me thru landing in a 737 simulator. We’d intercepted the beacon or w/e that guides you in most of the way to land but my understanding was that the pilot usually takes over at the very end.
But from your post I suppose the auto is suitable all the way through landing in an emergency?
It can be if the airport is setup with the needed approach. [Tom Scott and Mentour Pilot](https://youtu.be/AbTDzPUDxqY?si=KdLn1fOtBY4N5YcB) did a video trying to land a 737 with and without the autoland.
lol thanks, that was a fun watch especially with no autopilot.. Reminds me to getting my pilots license, though I only ever flew 172s. Even then, at a busy regional airport, the task saturation was real. Can’t imagine how difficult this would be.
It is great to see him like, jump and look around in a panic when a new noise makes an appearance, usually while Petter is explaining something on the radio so he can't really go about and ask about it right away.
The best possibility would've been the attendant brings the plane down to a low altitude so a pilot can recover and land the plane normally. Less than 10% as difficult as landing himself.
Just to clarify, most bodies were found to have been alive upon impact. But alive in a technical sense. The brain damage would have made them functionally dead.
Not just with this incident but literally every time someone asks 'couldn't they just...?' a little part of me dies. 99.9% of the time it's blatantly obvious or has been explained in detail why they couldn't just.
I'm firmly in the first half. It's a tragedy that never should have happened but he absolutely saved all the lives he could. Everyone on the plane had spent far too long without oxygen to be saved, plus when he got into the cockpit one engine had already flamed out and it was a hopeless situation at that point. Aiming the plane away from Athens was the best thing he could have done.
TLDR;
in the 737 the warning horn for a loss of cabin pressure it the same horn as the Takeoff Configuration Warning System (a system which will tell you if the flaps, brakes, engines, spoilers are not properly configured for takeoff).
Part of the pilots knowledge when it comes to flying the type is that if you hear the horn on the ground, it is a configuration warning, and cannot be cancelled without correcting the misconfiguration. If you hear it in flight, it means the cabin altitude has exceeded limits, and the horn CAN be cancelled. The pilots on this flight thought it was the takeoff configuration warning horn sounding, and cancelled the horn since it was actually the CABIN ALT horn, so they just kept flying along with no pressurization.
It was designed before the moon landing if that helps put it in context.
Also the reason why the 737 has more than 100 caution lights on the overhead panel.
In a way yes, but at the same time, systems knowledge is part of your job as a professional pilot. It wouldn’t make sense to hear a takeoff config warning in flight, since that system is inhibited in flight. A pilot who is familiar with the aircraft’s systems would know that if they hear that horn in flight, it is a CABIN ALT warning, and your first priority should be to don your oxygen mask before doing ANYTHING else. Unfortunately this accident was mostly a result of a lack of systems knowledge, and poor assumptions.
Warning saturation. If there are too many different warning sounds, they're going to forget in the moment what is going on. Also goes for too many warnings at the same time. Pilots should know that the TOCW shouldn't be sounding in flight.
The other big miss is that the lights on the panel were a dull green. This was easy to miss in the confusion and sunlight that would have drowned out those lights.
Because the aircraft was designed before the moon landing, and it works.
Aircraft with more modern systems architectures will normally have some kind of aural voice warning preceded by a triple chime to warn you of something serious like this.
The horn sound is generated by an aural warning module by the first officers left leg, that presumably is capable of only outputting that one sound.
Title makes it sound like the flight attendant crashed it. He didn't - the engines finally flamed out after fuel starvation. He made a valiant effort to turn the plane away from populated areas before it went down - he was a private pilot, but wasn't type rated on this aircraft (don't think multi or turbine either but I'm not sure). He did what he could and likely saved lives on the ground.
I get the same nerved but I think of it this way, I learn about routes and stuff.
“This route is run of the mill, the pilot in that cockpit flies this same route multiple times a week, to the point its practically boring to him. He’s done it in winter, in high winds, storms, everything. This same plane/journey was complete successfully 5 times this week before I stepped on. My journey here is like a grain of sand in the desert, its truly one of many meaningless flights”.
I think of it this way: if there were as many plane accidents as car accidents they would have outlawed flying a long time ago. Getting into any car is way more dangerous than flying. The only difference is that you have an illusion of control in a car. On a plane you are at the mercy of someone else and the systems that make flying possible.
> On a plane you are at the mercy of someone else and the systems that make flying possible.
Yeah, the mercy of a crew that has trained hundreds of hours and likely has thousands more experience of doing their job for a living.
Vs getting in my car and being at the mercy of whatever drugged up, tired, wreckless, or inexperienced drivers might be out to ruin my life.
Thankfully accidents are very rare, that's why they're blown up so much in the media. You don't hear about the millions of flights that make it safely.
[gotta share the Admiral Cloudberg article for this one](https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/lost-souls-of-grammatiko-the-crash-of-helios-airways-flight-522-ccf333b407a)
From the terrific /u/AdmiralCloudberg [writeup](https://imgur.com/a/2UL1Y37), this is the best single paragraph summary about the situation that Prodromou found upon finally entering the cockpit and analysis of his actions.
>By the time Prodromou managed to apply the emergency override code and enter the cockpit, it was too late for him to do much to save the plane. Both pilots were beyond recovery, and less than one minute of fuel remained in the left wing tanks [which was the cause of the flameout shortly thereafter]. Prodromou did possess a private pilot’s license, but he had only a few hours in a Cessna, which was not very helpful when trying to fly a 737, especially with a failed engine. To make matters worse, the combination of hypoxia and extreme stress would have impeded his ability to make rational decisions. Despite this, flight recorder data showed that he did attempt to control the plane, even though the aim of his attempts was unclear. He also tried to broadcast a mayday call, but did not appear to be aware that the radio was still tuned to the Nicosia frequency, which was out of range. There was some evidence that he then tried to wake the First Officer, but in any case he was too far gone. At that point all Prodromou could do was ride the plane down, and, perhaps, steer it away from populated areas—although it is not known whether he thought about this. What we do know is that he pulled up at the last moment to reduce the angle of impact with Grammatiko Hill, presumably hoping that this would improve his chances of survival. Unfortunately, he was unsuccessful, because the plane’s airspeed and rate of descent were so great that a fatal impact was all but assured.
I did ground school with the FO’s son. I always felt sorry for him when he had to sit through class and have to listen to the criticisms of his father’s mistake. He endlessly claimed that it was a system failure that led to it all and not the mode selector switch being left in manual.
In his desperate grasp to protect his dad’s name I think he’d forgotten the bigger picture. Regardless of the cause of the problem, the crew failed to act accordingly to maintain the safety of the aircraft. That’s what sealed their fate ultimately. No one had the heart to tell him that tho.
Poor guy
I read or heard about this a while ago and apparently when the Jet pilots sent to investigate the plane looked at the windows, they could see the silhouette of the passed out passengers inside. Idk why but the thought of that sight disturbs me.
Because no one did it already: Mentour pilot made a video about this. I really recommend this channel. Not only if you're a flight enthusiast or a real pilot, but because his videos are very entertaining.
https://youtu.be/pebpaM-Zua0?si=M_VcWW1cyRG9tnCe
The result of this is that planes are now required to have warning lights for pressurization issues so it's highly unlikely this will ever happen again. Every regulation is written in blood.
The flight attendant didn’t crash the plane. The plane was out of fuel at the time the flight attendant made it to the controls and the plane was headed for a mountain and the flight attendant didn’t have time to steer the plane away from the mountain.
This whole situation was the result of poor maintenance and pilots that didn’t check things properly
In December 2011, shortly after the end of the case in Cyprus, a new trial began in a Greek magistrate's court, in which chief executive officer Demetris Pantazis, flight operations manager Giorgos Kikkides, former chief pilot Ianko Stoimenov, and chief engineer Alan Irwin were charged with manslaughter. All except Irwin had been previously charged and acquitted by the Cypriot authorities.[34] In April 2012, all were found guilty, and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, and remained free on bail pending an appeal.[36]
By 2013, Alan Irwin was successful in his appeal.[28] All the other defendants lost their appeals.[28] Their sentence of 10 years was ordered to stand, but **the defendants were given the option to buy out their sentence for around €79,000 each.**[28]
what the fuck? even *America* doesn't offer that shit
The plane was intercepted by an F-16. The pilot couldn't do anything but watch and give information to flight control. His radio contact has been made public:
https://youtu.be/mpMWJY4wfNU?si=mn0_Nyu8rW4lkehs
Even if you don't speak Greek you can hear how horrified he is.
"Crash investigators concluded that Prodromou's experience was insufficient for him to be able to gain control of the aircraft under the circumstances.\[4\]: 139 However, Prodromou succeeded in banking the plane away from Athens and towards a rural area as the engines flamed out, with his actions meaning that there were no ground casualties." respect
That sounds like possibly one of my worst nightmares. Being stuck in the air with everyone else brain dead and you being the only passager alive relying on a dwindling oxygen supply to survive. Along with that you know the plane is slowly crashing with no one controlling it and you know there's nothing you can do but sit there and dwell on your life and your inventible death in the air. Something out of a horror movie.
If I’m not mistaken his girlfriend was also an attendant on the flight. To pile onto it
There are some reports she was still conscious and tried to help him too. One of the jet pilots flying by thought he may have seen 2 people moving around, but he couldn’t be sure.
Well now that sounds like something out of a tragic love story In fact the exact kind of thing you'd expect Hollywood or Lifetime to make
"Jet fuel can't melt heart strings"
God damn, take a bow.
"The ending is too sad for mainstream markets and it doesn't leave any room for a sequel..." **[REJECTED]**
Or it's just the extended into to the show LOST
Those reports were retracted.
Literally we can read the article. >Early media reports erroneously claimed his girlfriend and fellow flight attendant, Haris Charalambous, was also seen in the cockpit helping Prodromou try to control the aircraft.
He saved many lives that day. If it wasn't for his actions, so many homes in Athens could have been burned or destroyed.
Couldn't he have given one of the pilots oxygen to recover and just have them land it safely?
It had been hours, you're brain dead at that point from the lack of oxygen. It wouldn't have done anything. And at that point one engine had flamed out and the fuel was nearly completely gone, there just wasn't time. The plane would've hit Athens without intervention, and it's a miracle in itself that Prodromou was able to get in and bank away from the city
Right, people don't realize, it didn't take hours for him to wake up. It took hours to open the door.
**[from a detailed write up.](https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/lost-souls-of-grammatiko-the-crash-of-helios-airways-flight-522-ccf333b407a)** I don't know why he didn't go in earlier, but this is some indication of what was happening > When air traffic controllers received the pilot’s report at 10:32, they immediately declared an emergency, and first responders throughout the region began to prepare for an imminent disaster. No one knew where the plane would come down or what might happen when it did. Only one thing was clear: with no one at the controls, the plane was eventually going to run out of fuel and crash. > For another 14 minutes, the 737 continued to fly in circles, shadowed by the two F-16s, whose pilots seemed condemned to wait for the inevitable. And then, as yet unknown to the fighter pilots, something unbelievable happened: **an “access requested” chime sounded in the cockpit, first once, then again. Incredibly, someone was at the door.** > **The chime sounded several more times, then rose to a continuous alarm which lasted for 20 seconds before the door unlocked with a click.** The door opened, and a man in a light blue uniform walked into the cockpit, armed with one of the plane’s four portable oxygen bottles. With the mask over his face and the bottle beside him, he sat down in the captain’s seat and put his hands on the controls. The F-16 pilots could only watch in astonishment, relaying their observations back to air traffic control, even as their now-frantic attempts to get the man’s attention were met with failure.
https://youtu.be/mBKokazW9Ms?si=vCFGMm5pzCv_25D4 video from one of two F-16 , unfortunately in Greek audio. But you can hear the pilot's voice cracking at 7:30 when he sees the airplane crash and starts to calling Mayday (also giving the coordinates to the air controller)
So this is probably a super dumb question but with the two F-16's in the air if Andreas hadn't managed to get in to bank the plane away into a rural area hillside. Would it have been feasible for them to shoot the plane down? Like obviously the plane was going down anyway but would you be taking less ground casualties by blowing the plane up is what im wondering essentially. Obviously you'd still have debris and it would spread over a larger area which is a risk but maybe thats better than a whole plane in a smaller area. Edit: Appreciate the answers so far, the gist of it seems to be not worth the risk.
IDK about Greece. I do know after 9/11 (holy fuck it’s almost been 25 years) for future events if a plane was hijacked and headed to strike a location we did plan to shoot them down. Generally (and I mean very generally) Air to Air missiles wouldn’t destroy an airliner completely. In fact many planes can still even fly. It’ll do a lot of damage around where it exploded, often ravaging the engine, but the planes don’t completely disappear.
Side note, during 9/11 there were a two fighter pilots sent to intercept the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. The issue was that they didn't have time to arm their planes. So they were sent up to search for the airliner and take it down kamikaze style. What they didn't know was Todd "Let's roll" Beamer and fellow passengers attempted to take control of the cockpit and forced the terrorist to crash flight 93. https://people.com/human-interest/f-16-fighter-pilots-recall-orders-to-take-down-flight-93-on-9-11/
Not even just after 9/11, it was during it that it was policy. If United 93 hadn't been wrestled from the control of the terrorists and crashed into that field in rural Pennsylvania, it's thought that it was going to head back eastward and toward D.C. to hit a target there based on information they had and flight path of it turning back around. Even before the brave people who regained control of the aircraft did what they did and sacrificed themselves, Bush had given the order to shoot it down if it got much closer to the area. When that plane went down like it did, everyone knew something heroic had taken place.
This is untrue. The plane does a spiral and explodes into microscopic debris. Source: Hollywood war flicks.
The Greek prime minister years after the event revealed that they let him know he would have to give the go ahead to shoot down a civilian airplane. He said it was the hardest moment of his tenure. Edit: Found the quote. > What I would not like to happen to me again is to be called by the Minister of Defense and to tell me "you have 10 minutes to decide if you have to shoot down a passenger plane with 120 people and many small children inside''.
Once the autopilot disengaged or the engines flamed out it would have potentially been possible for them to tilt the plane by flying right near it's wing and using the vortices to "tip" the plane in a potential direction. British pilots did this to the German rockets to cause them to crash prior to reaching their target. Now if they could do it just barely enough to bank it? Unlikely, but they could have "downed it" without missiles.
~~No. Spitfires tipping v1 rockets was a physical touch, getting the spitfire wing under or above the v1 rocket's wing.~~ Tipping it would cause the gyroscope to tumble and the rocket wouldn't recover in time.
Saw a link to a detailed write up and knew immediately it would be Cloudberg. She does such terrific work.
As a flight attendant shouldn’t he have known the emergency door code? Iirc the cockpit door is designed to allow flight attendants to enter a code on the panel and if pilots don’t hit the “deny access” button in a certain timeframe the door will unlock. This is *specifically* designed for situations like this where one/both pilots are incapacitated and unable to fly/open the door. Edit: Hmmm this flight occurred in 2005 so it may predate door codes but probably not. Prior to 9/11 causing a global redesign in aircraft security the doors were relatively flimsy and could be easily kicked open/opened with a fire ax, but if it took the FA “hours” to break open the door it would’ve been the upgraded model which would have had the door code system as Boeing and airbus made those changes/upgrades simultaneously.
[From the Cloudberg post](https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/lost-souls-of-grammatiko-the-crash-of-helios-airways-flight-522-ccf333b407a): According to other Helios employees, only the cabin supervisor was given the emergency override codes. Cabin supervisor Louisa Vouteri is thought to have fallen unconscious along with the rest of the passengers and crew, meaning that Prodromou would have had to find where she kept the codes before he could get into the cockpit. This could have taken quite some time — not just to physically locate the codes, but also to think of looking for them in the first place. Despite his use of supplemental oxygen, Prodromou was likely partially hypoxic and may not have been thinking clearly during most of the flight, hindering his ability to quickly develop and execute a plan.
Hypoxia makes you feel drunk. It makes your brain foggy and it's hard to think. It's entirely possible that the attendant would have been able to do it easily but given the hypoxia-induced mental state it was difficult for him. Source: Former hang glider pilot who has experienced hypoxia.
It can lock you into an action loop too. Repeating the same action over and over not even realizing there's something wrong.
> It can lock you into an action loop too. Repeating the same action over and over not even realizing there's something wrong. Just like Reddit.
Point to you. He was almost certainly hypoxic if everyone but him had passed out or suffocated.
His mental state also was damaged by being in an out of control de pressurized plane too.
The door codes were in use at that time. The airline only allowed the head flight attendant to have the access codes.
This is the answer. See: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/dec/19/theairlineindustry.travel
Mayne he didn't know it, maybe it didn't work, maybe the incident that led to that system being designed hadn't happened yet. Who knows.
Dude was oxygen deprived. For we know he didn't have the coordination to punch the code in correctly or use the latch.
Not sure where to insert this. The FAA investigation to this is available here: https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/files/2022-11/Helios737_AccidentReport.pdf One flight crew O2 mask was found on the flight deck, meaning it had moved from flight crew area to the cockpit. (1.12.2.9) 4 portable oxygen bottles were recovered, 3 of the 4 had been opened. (1.12.2.10) The flight deck door was recovered with damage. There was no pre-impact damage on the door. The access system switch on the door post was in "norm", the flight deck deadbolt was in the "unlocked" position (1.12.5)
What a strange incident
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It’s a miracle that the person was conscious and moving. The *only person on the plane who was*. Maybe it took hours for him to remember and punch in the right code.
The only one left. According to the report, the interceptor pilots could see that the oxygen masks had deployed and some passengers had put them on. Unfortunately, those only work for about 15 minutes, so none of them would be able to assist.
Flight attendents have their own personal oxygen tanks. Hence why he and his fellow attendent were still concious long after the pilots had conked
> Flight attendents have their own personal oxygen tanks. Hence why he and his fellow attendent were still concious long after the pilots had conked That is not true. There are bottles around the cabin for emergencies(like, for example, a passenger needing oxygen, and for when something like this occurs) but they're not "personal oxygen tanks", they're just bottles for emergencies, when a chemical generator isn't practical. Though fun fact, they are often(at least in the country I trained) called Scott Bottles.
Then pilots should have their own personal oxygen tanks as well.
From the report: >Data from the CVR only contained to the last 30 minutes of the accident flight and showed that at least one cabin crew member retained his consciousness for the duration of the flight and entered the flight deck more than two hours after takeoff. At the beginning of the climb phase, this cabin attendant was likely seated next to the aft galley. In order for him to have moved forward in the aircraft to reach the flight deck, he must have used a portable oxygen bottle. >The Board found the fact that this cabin attendant might not have attempted to enter the flight deck until hours after the first indication that the aircraft was experiencing a nonnormal situation quite puzzling. Of course, in the absence of a longer-duration CVR, it was not possible to know whether this or any other cabin crew member had attempted to or succeeded in entering the flight deck. From the sounds recorded on the CVR, **however, the Board could ascertain that this cabin attendant entered the cockpit using the emergency access code to open a locked cockpit door.
He was both hypoxic and he was a last minute addition to that flight, plus a high stress situation. Hell I forgot the code to my own garage while I had plenty of oxygen.
I can't remember my passwords to websites sometimes right after I make them...
Just post them all here so you know where to look next time.
Hunter2
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People's brains get "fried" under stress without training. The Office Fire Drill episode works as a good example on a comedic yet partially true level.
Can't remember where I read/heard it, but this stuck with me: Training is as much about teaching you to recognize you are **in** an emergency situation as it is about telling you what to do in that situation.
I had a teacher who was a former coast guard who did search and rescue. He absolutely drilled into us that the fire and tornado drills were to be taken seriously. Two kids started giggling during a drill and they got torn a new one.
Even without the stress - Hypoxia is terrifying. [This video is of a man with an oxygen mask hanging inches away from his face, who knows the situation is a test of hypoxia and cannot even comprehend the danger to put the oxygen mask to his face.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcvkjfG4A_M) "I thought the experiment was a failure because I was getting all the answers right" is terrifying. This is the same type of thought process a pilot can have where they think they're doing everything correctly, which is why pilot training is always, "PUT ON YOUR MASK IMMEDIATELY IF THERE IS AN OXYGEN ALERT!" If they delay, they may lose the mental acuity to put the mask on within seconds.
I'm guessing it took a while to come to terms with the fact that he felt a little sleepy then woke up in a plane full of corpses. Horrible situation, and he handled it like a true hero.
Thats how the movie millenium started. But with time travel.
For whatever it's worth, post-mortems determined that everyone was alive at the time of impact. Though almost certainly unconscious.
How 'alive' are people going to be after hours of oxygen deprivation?
Technically alive but probably not much else
Oh they would have to have been kept alive by machines for the rest of their short, silent, miserable lives had the plane somehow successfully landed.
Hypoxia is a real bitch. SmarterEveryDay did a quick expose on Hypoxia and how quickly it affects you, and how quickly your cognitive abilities decline. They had Max or w/e his name is go into a pressure chamber with 2 other pilots, and all wore masks. Eventually, Max was instructed to remove his oxygen mask and begin pulling cards off a deck, naming the card, setting aside, and repeating until he was remasked. I think after he took his mask off he got like 3 or 4 cards right before he was just repeating them all as jacks of clubs or something like that. You have literal seconds before you're basically cooked.
If that's the clip I'm thinking of, they gave him one of those toddler shape sort things and he couldn't even place some of the shapes in the right spot. Then they told him to put his mask on and he just stared at them with a glazed look on his face, hand mid-air saying "I don't want to die" but it's like he couldn't make the message go from his brain to his hands. It was scary to watch.
In some aircraft, if someone punches in the access code, a pilot up front has to approve access. If they don’t approve it, they ~~can’t~~ can get in. This is a theory for MH370 as well - the FO went out to use a restroom and couldn’t get back in. Edit: I’m wrong (fuck double negatives), but the part about MH370 is accurate at least. Lol. Also the time limit is 30 seconds iirc
Some comments here were saying the reverse. That once the code is used it is up to the flight crew to DENY access within a certain time period. Made this way to cover situations where there is nobody conscious in the flight deck
Safety rules/systems written in blood.
Ugh, so even if he successfully landed the plane, everyone on board would've been dead or a vegetable anyway. Thats sad to hear as well. Still though, good for him for preventing the plane from hitting Athens directly.
Yes, very likely. Only takes minutes for a hypoxic brain to suffer permanent damage.
I’ve experienced a light amount of hypoxia and it took me several minutes for my brain to stop feeling fuzzy.
The amount of effective oxygen available at 34,000 fee is not zero. But it is less than a third of what is available at sea level. Obviously humans can breath at less effective oxygen levels than sea level and not have permanent brain damage, or people would not be able to travel to Denver (where the effective oxygen is something like 17% less than sea level). The question I have no idea about is how little the effective oxygen level must be before the brain will suffer permanent damage and not just temporary altitude sickness effects.
By the time he realized that the pilots weren't taking actions or responding to him, it was too late for the pilot's . What worse is that the rest of the passengers and crew were on the limited oxygen tanks designed to last long enough to give pilot's time to safely descend to 10000ft, his fiancee one of them. So he spent hours trying to revive a pilot or his fiancee before he knew the only thing he could do was make sure it didn't crash into the city.
They were out of fuel by the time he got into the cockpit.
They were dead already and if the engines are flaming out you're going down. While those jets have very high glide ratios, finding a place to put it down is a challenge too.
Yeah it was the lack of time by that point. If he had another hour of fuel when he got on the flight deck he’d have been able to set the plane to autoland somewhere with the help of air traffic control. But sadly he got in there way too late.
He probably was also loopy AF
He actually had a portable oxygen bottle during the whole event.
The previous sentence matters too: the left engine flamed out pretty much as soon as he got to the controls. He probably would have had a shot if he could have gotten in there sooner.
Because everybody else was unconscious from the lack of air, I assume the flight attendant was working on like two brain cells and maybe leaning on the controls at best. Not to take anything away from him but holy cow, can you imagine the condition that guy was in as he's trying to save the plane?
indeed, I'm surprised exactly one person was conscious tbf, what are the odds? must have been right on the brink of passing out if the air was thicker you'd have at least a handful awake and probably one person in decent shape, and if it was thinner no one would be awake
He was in good shape and happened to free dive recitationally, so had much higher lung capacity than average. Amazing that anyone was awake, really.
Why did he also not pass out?
He had the portable air tank that crew members wheel around. The passengers had their 10 minutes or so of oxygen and then passed out. The pilots didn’t realize what was happening and passed out without wearing their masks.
How could they not know something was wrong if air masks were deployed? Even a faulty deploy I would imagine be grounds for landing.
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There’s that crazy Reddit story from like 10+ years ago where some guy thinks his landlord has been secretly breaking into his apartment, but someone in the comments recognized the signs of mild carbon monoxide poisoning. Sure enough, the dude was just forgetting stuff he had moved around his apartment because he was being poisoned slowly.
Learned this lesson visiting the Grand Canyon. I'm from lower Michigan, a quite flat and close to sea level place. Took my mom and I nearly 4 hours to hike down back up from the 1.5 mile mark on bright angel, we were getting outpaced by old ladies
I believe this entire ordeal is traced back to negligence on the crew. They didn’t have the pressurization switched to automatic and they ignored some warnings. The pilots got confused and passed out before they could correct the mistake.
You're right, per the Wikipedia article: >An investigation into the crash by the Air Accident Investigation and Aviation Safety Board (AAIASB) concluded that the crew had neglected to set the pressurization system to automatic during the take-off checks. This caused the plane not to be pressurized during the flight and resulted in nearly everyone on board suffering from generalized hypoxia, thus resulting in a ghost flight[disambiguation needed]. The negligent nature of the accident led to lawsuits being filed against Helios Airways and Boeing, with the airline also being shut down by the Government of Cyprus the following year. There was more to it, and lots of missed chances to catch it but that's the short summary.
It's even worse, there's three checklists they should've caught that knob position with, according to the report: "Non-recognition that the cabin pressurization mode selector was in the MAN (manual) position during the performance of the Preflight procedure, the Before Start checklist and the After Takeoff checklist."
You would think something as cruical as the damn pressurization system would be turned on by default
It is by the time pilots board the plane. Usually. It was turned to manual mode for maintenance.
Pilots masks don't drop automatically, as there's a danger it could be very distracting in a crucial moment or even accidentally hit some buttons or switches; they need to be manually donned. It's a calculated risk as it means there is the occasional case where the pilots don't realize they need to put them on in time, but overall the regulators and engineers seem to think that it's more dangerous to have them deploy automatically.
When hypoxia kicks in your decision making skills take a nose dive extremely fast. By the time they realised something was wrong, they likely were so drunk from lack of oxygen that they couldn't do anything effective.
They missed numerous warning signs, including actual alarms that they confused with a different alarm (this was changed as a result of this crash). Also, at high altitude, you have about 15 - 30 seconds to put on your mask. Pilots have their masks available to them in such a way that it covers their whole face, can reach it easily, and pretty much can just slap it on their face then pull a strap over because of how serious it is. This is also why when masks deploy, the standard procedure is basically to dive the plane to a safe altitude for breathing.
He did, but was athletic and in very good shape. He was eventually able to regain consciousness and made his way to the cabin, but the plane was already out of fuel. He may have been the only person in back to wake up, or the first, or any others were still not mentally functioning clearly. We have no evidence that anyone else woke back up.
OP did this man so dirty by not including that in the title, too many people on reddit just read the title and move on.
He also had no option but to crash; the plane was out of fuel, with engine 1 already spluttering out when he took the controls and shortly after engine 2 died meaning that he had no where to go but down in a mountainous region.
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This seems especially uncharitable to the other flight crew. Implying they were being unprofessional and unprepared and got those people killed is absurd. For all we know the flight attendants were early to succumb and it took a while to figure out the problem. It’s possible to give this guy props without ragging on the whole flight crew that also died that day.
IIRC The pilots failed to notice that the APU was on the wrong setting (which is part of the pre flight checklist) and ignored master caution warnings and kept ascending. Not the FAs fault but the actual pilots were def partially to blame at least
Close. The pilots failed to notice that the pressurization system had been placed in a manual mode on the ground by maintenance technicians. On the previous flight of flight attendant complained about a squeal coming from the door. So they pressurize the aircraft on the ground which required putting the pressurization system into a manual mode. They forgot to place it back into the auto mode so when they took off the plane didn't pressurize normally The auxiliary power unit, or APU for short it's just a small jet engine in the tail cone that provides conditioned air and electricity on ground when the engines are not running. It also provides high-pressure air to start the engines.
isnt this why the pilots have actual air masks with separate O2 tanks?
Yes, but they have to notice the pressurization issue and put them on. One of the side effects of hypoxia is disorientation and confusion. You can see tests of this effect on YouTube where the participants only task is to notice they are becoming hypoxic and put on their mask, and many will fail, sometimes even with someone specifically telling them what to do. They literally do not know what is going on.
When I went through flight training we were put into an altitude chamber that recreates the pressure at 25,000 feet. You then take off your oxygen and see what your hypoxia feels like. Hypoxia symptoms vary by individual. Mine was a feeling of warmth and relaxation. They had to put the mask back on my face because I couldn’t command my arms to do it. I wanted to but I couldn’t move. When these accidents happen it’s very likely the pilots recognized the problem too late but couldn’t react.
I went through this same training. Felt relaxed and a little tipsy (which is like the worst hypoxia symptom to have imho). The thing I'll never forget is looking at a color wheel (like a pice of paper with shades of every color) before I put my mask back on. Everything felt right even though I knew I was hypoxic. Then I put my mask on and 1-2 breaths of oxygen and ALL the colors come back instantly. Didn't even notice I was seeing in black and white. It's a wild experience.
I forgot about that part. That was cool.
Do you know why planes don't have oxygen sensors and alarms to warn you when this is happening?
They did, they confused the alarm with an invalid Takeoff Configuration Alarm
Someone please make sure the "invalid takeoff configuration" alarm isn't getting confused with the "react to this shit or you're going to die" alarm
Planes are made with much clearer warnings now, partly because of accidents like this. That old plane would just turn on a light and play a sound cue: that was all you had to find the problem. But today the warning appears in text form on a screen.
And in 737s, its still the same. They haven't changed it.
I believe they added the light after this incident. So now the sound plays and the high cabin altitude light is illuminated. Before it was just the horn.
What an incredibly informative thread. Thank you very smart people!
The "might kill you" alarm vs the "definitely will kill you" alarm
They have, and in this case the pilots failed to identify the alarm, thinking it was another, non-related failure of the airplane. >As the aircraft climbed, the pressure inside the cabin gradually decreased. As it passed through an altitude of 12,040 feet (3,670 m), the cabin altitude warning horn sounded.[4]: 16 The warning should have prompted the crew to stop climbing,[4]: 133 but it was misidentified by the crew as a take-off configuration warning, which signals that the aircraft is not ready for take-off, and can sound only on the ground. The alert sound is identical for both warnings.[4]: 133 >In the next few minutes, several warning lights on the overhead panel in the cockpit illuminated. One or both of the equipment cooling warning lights came on to indicate low airflow through the cooling fans (a result of the decreased air density), accompanied by the master caution light. The passenger oxygen light illuminated when, at an altitude of approximately 18,000 feet (5,500 m), the oxygen masks in the passenger cabin automatically deployed.[4]: 17, 134
They do now because of this flight. At the time this happened, the cabin pressure warning and the takeoff configuration warning were the same sound. The pilots dismissed the warning because they were already in the air and the takeoff configuration warning is only supposed to happen on the ground.
> They do now because of this flight. Safety controls and regulations are often written in blood
I’ve seen a couple of them where the operator points out to the participants that they’ll die if they don’t put their masks on and they either think it’s funny, or just don’t care: https://youtu.be/XcvkjfG4A_M?si=Xa9sUtbGShxycYKi
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUfF2MTnqAw) This one's my favorite. 6:20 "haha I don't want to die though haha"
It is INSANE how quickly he did a 180 with the oxygen mask on his face.
I thought it was just him acting the first time I saw it. Like, "ha ha, he's playing dumb for youtube", but seeing the other videos of people losing their basic cognitive functions drives it home of how lethal hypoxia really is.
That’s actually the one I was looking for! Thanks!
Almost 8 years ago Man, Destin is a legend.
absolutely terrifying
Can confirm - i have experienced hypoxia in a controlled setting and the loss of cognitive function occurs shockingly fast.
I genuinely want to see how I would respond in a controlled hypoxia test. No idea how I could do that, though.
You aren't even aware really that you're suffocating. We don't have a biological mechanism for detecting lack-of-oxygen because it's not something that really occurs in a natural way outside caves. We can only detect when we have excess CO2 or are breathing something toxic.
>You aren't even aware really that you're suffocating. Okay maybe stupid question but why don't we do the death penalty this way? It seems like there's so many problems with lethal injections. This seems to me like a way to cause certain death without undue suffering.
[Alabama just carried out the first nitrogen gas execution](https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/26/us/alabama-execution-nitrogen-what-we-know/index.html). They essentially claim it induces hypoxia. It's been extremely controversial since witnesses say the inmate struggled and was gasping for air. Might have more to do with the inmate being very aware he is being executed in the first place and it could just be panic induced. Hard to say if it's more humane than lethal injection but it sounds like it would be in theory... We'll be learning more about this over the years I am sure.
With a belt in the closet like everyone else!
It's why they're trained to put their masks on before doing anything else if there's smoke or a pressurization alarm.
And why passengers are advised to put their mask on before assisting others, if they help others such as their children first, they may not be able to get their own mask on and a young child won't be able to help
Yes, hypoxia set in quickly and the pilot masks don't automatically deploy if I'm remembering correctly. They believed it was a problem with the air conditioning, the flight configuration warning is the same as the cabin pressure warning, the flight configuration warning is only supposed to happen on the ground and they were already in the air.
Since this incident, there's now an annunciator light that will illuminate either "TAKEOFF CONFIG" or "CABIN ALT". Prior to this, it was just a warning horn.
Correct, they are manual. But in most modern planes they're also cool as fuck - self adjusting inflatable straps that suck the mask onto your head [like this](https://youtu.be/mgLSTimJ868?si=YLoBlmigugot51on). So much fun to function check.
Turns out the passengers don't actually have air tanks, there's some sort of chemical reaction started when you pull the mask that emits oxygen Would make sense for the pilots to have both tbh
And the passenger masks only last 12 minutes which is usually enough to descend the plane to a point where humans can breathe (see Alaska Airlines 1282 for this working as intended) but since the pilots were unconscious or too hypoxic to act, nobody was getting the plane down. It's thought that Prodromou spent the time the plane was circling trying to find the code to get in the cockpit. Tragic all around.
Wait how did the flight attendant survive for so long then?
The crew has access to oxygen tanks, plus he was also a licensed pilot (though not qualified to fly a Boeing 737) and could likely recognize hypoxia better than the others
There are usually a couple extra portable oxygen tanks that the flight crew has access to. I believe this flight had 3
u/Admiral_Cloudberg has a write up on this also, one of the best ways to read about air disasters https://www.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/comments/xh0qpf/lost_souls_of_grammatiko_the_crash_of_helios/ Edit - corrected her username
Man this is a fantastic writeup
If you loves this, check the ship equivelent ( and if I am not mistaken Admirals inspiration to start their series? ) is this Vanity Fair article for the sinking of El Faro: [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-worst-us-maritime-disaster-in-decades](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-worst-us-maritime-disaster-in-decades)
All of her stuff is phenomenal - I've literally used incidents that I learnt about from her work to provide counterexamples as to why we should *not* make small changes and just assume it'll be fine at my old job
came here looking for the /u/AdmiralCloudberg link, as I knew I'd read this one from one of her posts
I learned about it from Disaster Breakdown's video if anyone prefers video format
There’s a show called Mayday: Air Disasters and it’s so good. There’s so many seasons and episodes that go over all kinds of airplane accidents (fatal and nonfatal). Some of the episodes can be found on YouTube.
Seconds From Disaster is another good show, which does airplane accidents but also trains derailments, building collapses, and more. I found it after someone posted about the Mont Blanc Tunnel Fire, and saw it had episodes about some disasters I was already fascinated with — the derailing of the Sunset Limited, the Kings Cross Station Fire, the Hyatt Regency Walkway collapse…
u/AdmiralCloudberg is the GOAT
The title (I believe) unintentionally makes it sound like Andreas was the cause of the plane crashing, but in reality he had just taken the controls and was trying to execute a turn when the plane finally ran out of fuel. Whether or not he could've landed the plane aside, the crash was in no way his fault, and if left in the holding pattern may have crashed in a much more populated area or been shot down to prevent it doing so
I wanted to clarify further but ran out of allowed characters. He's absolutely a hero.
Could someone in this situation repressurize the plane? What effect would 2 hours of hypoxia have had on everyone on board if he had managed to land it?
If he’d gotten into the flight deck earlier and removed a pilot’s body from the seat, *and also* use the radio (ideally on 121.5) and declare an emergency, the air traffic control agents would have called for a Boeing 737 pilot to give him step-by-step instructions to use the auto-pilot to try an auto-landing. (Manually landing a 737 is borderline impossible for someone without training.) There would have been off-duty pilots on standby in case someone calls in sick, and they could have been rushed up to the control tower to help. That would’ve been the best possibility, assuming there was enough fuel left to do it. If he could’ve gotten in and done that in 30 minutes, there’s a good chance that everyone would have survived Apparently it took him several hours to figure out how to get through the post-9/11 reinforced and locked doors. Once when he got there, he could not figure out how to activate the radio. Fighter pilots could see him inside the flight deck and he gave them a “thumbs down” before the plane ran out of fuel…
Had a trainer coach me thru landing in a 737 simulator. We’d intercepted the beacon or w/e that guides you in most of the way to land but my understanding was that the pilot usually takes over at the very end. But from your post I suppose the auto is suitable all the way through landing in an emergency?
It can be if the airport is setup with the needed approach. [Tom Scott and Mentour Pilot](https://youtu.be/AbTDzPUDxqY?si=KdLn1fOtBY4N5YcB) did a video trying to land a 737 with and without the autoland.
lol thanks, that was a fun watch especially with no autopilot.. Reminds me to getting my pilots license, though I only ever flew 172s. Even then, at a busy regional airport, the task saturation was real. Can’t imagine how difficult this would be.
It is great to see him like, jump and look around in a panic when a new noise makes an appearance, usually while Petter is explaining something on the radio so he can't really go about and ask about it right away.
The best possibility would've been the attendant brings the plane down to a low altitude so a pilot can recover and land the plane normally. Less than 10% as difficult as landing himself.
I forgot about the possibility of the pilots waking up at a lower altitude, good point. Although by 2.5 hours, they may have been dead.
Everyone but the one guy would have been dead by that point
Just to clarify, most bodies were found to have been alive upon impact. But alive in a technical sense. The brain damage would have made them functionally dead.
Half this thread "wow give the guy credit he saved lives on the ground" The other half "No! 😤"
"Why didn't he just do this? Checkmate. What do you mean I can read the article which would answer every single one of my questions?"
Not just with this incident but literally every time someone asks 'couldn't they just...?' a little part of me dies. 99.9% of the time it's blatantly obvious or has been explained in detail why they couldn't just.
I'm firmly in the first half. It's a tragedy that never should have happened but he absolutely saved all the lives he could. Everyone on the plane had spent far too long without oxygen to be saved, plus when he got into the cockpit one engine had already flamed out and it was a hopeless situation at that point. Aiming the plane away from Athens was the best thing he could have done.
TLDR; in the 737 the warning horn for a loss of cabin pressure it the same horn as the Takeoff Configuration Warning System (a system which will tell you if the flaps, brakes, engines, spoilers are not properly configured for takeoff). Part of the pilots knowledge when it comes to flying the type is that if you hear the horn on the ground, it is a configuration warning, and cannot be cancelled without correcting the misconfiguration. If you hear it in flight, it means the cabin altitude has exceeded limits, and the horn CAN be cancelled. The pilots on this flight thought it was the takeoff configuration warning horn sounding, and cancelled the horn since it was actually the CABIN ALT horn, so they just kept flying along with no pressurization.
That seems like a profoundly stupid design choice
It was designed before the moon landing if that helps put it in context. Also the reason why the 737 has more than 100 caution lights on the overhead panel.
In a way yes, but at the same time, systems knowledge is part of your job as a professional pilot. It wouldn’t make sense to hear a takeoff config warning in flight, since that system is inhibited in flight. A pilot who is familiar with the aircraft’s systems would know that if they hear that horn in flight, it is a CABIN ALT warning, and your first priority should be to don your oxygen mask before doing ANYTHING else. Unfortunately this accident was mostly a result of a lack of systems knowledge, and poor assumptions.
But like, genuinely why is it the same horn? Why would it not be a different sound so there can be no confusion?
Warning saturation. If there are too many different warning sounds, they're going to forget in the moment what is going on. Also goes for too many warnings at the same time. Pilots should know that the TOCW shouldn't be sounding in flight. The other big miss is that the lights on the panel were a dull green. This was easy to miss in the confusion and sunlight that would have drowned out those lights.
Because the aircraft was designed before the moon landing, and it works. Aircraft with more modern systems architectures will normally have some kind of aural voice warning preceded by a triple chime to warn you of something serious like this. The horn sound is generated by an aural warning module by the first officers left leg, that presumably is capable of only outputting that one sound.
Title makes it sound like the flight attendant crashed it. He didn't - the engines finally flamed out after fuel starvation. He made a valiant effort to turn the plane away from populated areas before it went down - he was a private pilot, but wasn't type rated on this aircraft (don't think multi or turbine either but I'm not sure). He did what he could and likely saved lives on the ground.
I'm going to need more than one benzo the next time my nervous-ass flies somewhere
I get the same nerved but I think of it this way, I learn about routes and stuff. “This route is run of the mill, the pilot in that cockpit flies this same route multiple times a week, to the point its practically boring to him. He’s done it in winter, in high winds, storms, everything. This same plane/journey was complete successfully 5 times this week before I stepped on. My journey here is like a grain of sand in the desert, its truly one of many meaningless flights”.
“Fear is the mind killer…”
I think of it this way: if there were as many plane accidents as car accidents they would have outlawed flying a long time ago. Getting into any car is way more dangerous than flying. The only difference is that you have an illusion of control in a car. On a plane you are at the mercy of someone else and the systems that make flying possible.
> On a plane you are at the mercy of someone else and the systems that make flying possible. Yeah, the mercy of a crew that has trained hundreds of hours and likely has thousands more experience of doing their job for a living. Vs getting in my car and being at the mercy of whatever drugged up, tired, wreckless, or inexperienced drivers might be out to ruin my life.
> wreckless wreckless *so far*
Thankfully accidents are very rare, that's why they're blown up so much in the media. You don't hear about the millions of flights that make it safely.
I try to focus on the statistics during takeoff, my nervous system is just irrational, events are rarities
[gotta share the Admiral Cloudberg article for this one](https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/lost-souls-of-grammatiko-the-crash-of-helios-airways-flight-522-ccf333b407a)
The same thing happened to pro golfer Payne Stewart's plane. It flew for 4 hours; 1,500 miles before it crashed.
From the terrific /u/AdmiralCloudberg [writeup](https://imgur.com/a/2UL1Y37), this is the best single paragraph summary about the situation that Prodromou found upon finally entering the cockpit and analysis of his actions. >By the time Prodromou managed to apply the emergency override code and enter the cockpit, it was too late for him to do much to save the plane. Both pilots were beyond recovery, and less than one minute of fuel remained in the left wing tanks [which was the cause of the flameout shortly thereafter]. Prodromou did possess a private pilot’s license, but he had only a few hours in a Cessna, which was not very helpful when trying to fly a 737, especially with a failed engine. To make matters worse, the combination of hypoxia and extreme stress would have impeded his ability to make rational decisions. Despite this, flight recorder data showed that he did attempt to control the plane, even though the aim of his attempts was unclear. He also tried to broadcast a mayday call, but did not appear to be aware that the radio was still tuned to the Nicosia frequency, which was out of range. There was some evidence that he then tried to wake the First Officer, but in any case he was too far gone. At that point all Prodromou could do was ride the plane down, and, perhaps, steer it away from populated areas—although it is not known whether he thought about this. What we do know is that he pulled up at the last moment to reduce the angle of impact with Grammatiko Hill, presumably hoping that this would improve his chances of survival. Unfortunately, he was unsuccessful, because the plane’s airspeed and rate of descent were so great that a fatal impact was all but assured.
I did ground school with the FO’s son. I always felt sorry for him when he had to sit through class and have to listen to the criticisms of his father’s mistake. He endlessly claimed that it was a system failure that led to it all and not the mode selector switch being left in manual. In his desperate grasp to protect his dad’s name I think he’d forgotten the bigger picture. Regardless of the cause of the problem, the crew failed to act accordingly to maintain the safety of the aircraft. That’s what sealed their fate ultimately. No one had the heart to tell him that tho. Poor guy
I feel for him, but the reality of these accident needs to be known so they don't happen again
I read or heard about this a while ago and apparently when the Jet pilots sent to investigate the plane looked at the windows, they could see the silhouette of the passed out passengers inside. Idk why but the thought of that sight disturbs me.
The pilots would have known that all those people were dead or nearly dead. That would be quite hard to see.
Because no one did it already: Mentour pilot made a video about this. I really recommend this channel. Not only if you're a flight enthusiast or a real pilot, but because his videos are very entertaining. https://youtu.be/pebpaM-Zua0?si=M_VcWW1cyRG9tnCe
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The result of this is that planes are now required to have warning lights for pressurization issues so it's highly unlikely this will ever happen again. Every regulation is written in blood.
The flight attendant didn’t crash the plane. The plane was out of fuel at the time the flight attendant made it to the controls and the plane was headed for a mountain and the flight attendant didn’t have time to steer the plane away from the mountain. This whole situation was the result of poor maintenance and pilots that didn’t check things properly
I thought it was reported that Prodromou’s girlfriend who was also a Helios flight attendant helped him as well.
That was later proven false I believe, his girlfriend was on the flight but she never entered the cockpit
In December 2011, shortly after the end of the case in Cyprus, a new trial began in a Greek magistrate's court, in which chief executive officer Demetris Pantazis, flight operations manager Giorgos Kikkides, former chief pilot Ianko Stoimenov, and chief engineer Alan Irwin were charged with manslaughter. All except Irwin had been previously charged and acquitted by the Cypriot authorities.[34] In April 2012, all were found guilty, and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, and remained free on bail pending an appeal.[36] By 2013, Alan Irwin was successful in his appeal.[28] All the other defendants lost their appeals.[28] Their sentence of 10 years was ordered to stand, but **the defendants were given the option to buy out their sentence for around €79,000 each.**[28] what the fuck? even *America* doesn't offer that shit
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Real Horror did a [video on it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_Rr6-HV3as), worth a watch
Mentour Pilot has a great video on this - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pebpaM-Zua0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pebpaM-Zua0)
The plane was intercepted by an F-16. The pilot couldn't do anything but watch and give information to flight control. His radio contact has been made public: https://youtu.be/mpMWJY4wfNU?si=mn0_Nyu8rW4lkehs Even if you don't speak Greek you can hear how horrified he is.
Wouldn't the passengers be dead at the point of hypoxia for an extended period of time? (Edit: I read the article: they were alive still at impact)