Greece Plane Crash Kills All 121 Aboard

[linuxgeek]

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Greece Plane Crash Kills All 121 Aboard

August 14, 2005, 10:09 AM EDT

GRAMMATIKO, Greece -- A Cypriot airliner crashed into a hill north of Athens on Sunday, killing all 121 people on board. Reports said at least one of the pilots was unconscious when the plane went down, possibly from lack of oxygen in the cabin.

The Helios Airways flight HCY 522 was headed from Larnaca, Cyprus, to Athens International Airport when it crashed at 12:20 p.m. near the town of Grammatiko, about 25 miles north of the Greek capital, leaving flaming debris and luggage strewn across a ravine and surrounding hills.

The Boeing 737, carrying 115 passengers and six crew, was to have flown onto Prague, Czech Republic, after stopping in Athens.

"The fire is still burning and there are no survivors," fire chief Christos Smetis said.

The cause of the crash was unclear, but early indications were that it was a technical problem -- possibly decompression -- and not terrorism. The plane's black boxes, which contain flight data and voice recordings, had been recovered at the scene, state NET television reported.

"The first indications, in Cyprus and in Greece, are that it was not caused by a terrorist act," said Marios Karoyian, a spokesman for President Tassos Papadopoulos.

A man whose cousin was a passenger on the plane told Greece's Alpha television he received a cell-phone text message minutes before the crash. "He told me the pilots were unconscious. ... He said: "Farewell, cousin, here we're frozen," Sotiris Voutas said.

Two F-16 fighter jets were sent out shortly after the plane entered Greek air space over the Aegean Sea and did not respond to radio calls -- a standard Greek practice. As they intercepted the airliner shortly before it crashed, the jet pilots saw one of the pilots slumped unconscious over the controls, Alpha TV reported. They also reported that there was no movement in the cabin.

Greek state television quoted Cyprus Transport Minister Haris Thrasou as saying the plane had decompression problems in the past.

David Kaminski Morrow, deputy news editor of the British-based Air Transport Intelligence magazine, said depressurization is extremely serious because its effects happen so quickly.

"If the aircraft is at 30,000 feet, you don't stay conscious for long, maybe 15 to 30 seconds. It is like standing on top of Mount Everest," he said. "But if you are down at 10,000 feet, you can breath for a lot longer."

Airplane cabins are usually pressurized at 8,000 feet.

Sudden loss of cabin pressure was blamed for a similar crash that took place in South Dakota on Oct. 25, 1999. A private Learjet 35 lost pressure, leaving pro golfer Payne Stewart and four others unconscious. The twin-engine jet went down in a pasture after flying halfway across the country on autopilot.

In the Greek crash, the only piece of the plane that remained intact was the tail section. Bits of human flesh, clothing, and luggage were scattered around the wreckage, which also started brush fires around the area.

Rescue helicopters flew overhead and firefighting planes swooped low to extinguish some of the fires. Fire trucks and ambulances crowded roads near the crash site and dark black smoke could be seen rising from various sites around the crash. A number of black-robed Greek Orthodox Christian were also on the scene.

Rescue officials were also looking for the plane's two black boxes, two orange-colored devices that record data from the plane and the voices of the pilots in the cockpit. They are designed to survive crashes.

"The Helios flight that crashed in the Athens area left Larnaca and was headed for Athens. The causes of the crash are not known," government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos said.

Rescue workers and residents on the scene said they had not found any survivors.

"There is wreckage everywhere. I am here, things here are very difficult, they are indescribable," Grammatiko Mayor George Papageorgiou said. "I am looking at back tail. The fuselage has been destroyed. It fell into a chasm and there are pieces. All the residents are here trying to help."

The head of the Greek airline safety committee, Akrivos Tsolakis, described it as the "worst accident we've ever had."

He speculated that there may have been a problem with the cabin pressure.

"There apparently was a lack of oxygen, which is usually the case when the cabin is de-pressurized," Tsolakis said.

Witnesses said they saw the plane being followed by the Greek air force jets when it crashed.

Greek radio and television stations reported that the air force pilots saw no movement in the cockpit of the plane before the crash. There were some reports the two pilots seemed to be unconscious.

"The plane crashed around 400 meters (yards) from homes in the area," said Miltiadis Merkouris, a spokesman for the Grammatiko municipality.

Helios Airways was founded in 1999 as Cyprus' first private airline. It operates a fleet of Boeing 737 jets to cities including London; Athens; Sofia, Bulgaria; Dublin, Ireland; and Strasbourg, France.

Greek Prime Minister Costas Caramanlis canceled a holiday on the Aegean island of Tinos to return to Athens to deal with the crash. Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos also canceled a vacation.

 

[Killswitch]

I first thought of Kbate but I dont think shes near greece anymore or coming through the Czech Rep.

Maybe Slick was on it though.

lol

 

[BoobsNBrains]

Gotta hate that.

Also gotta hate the fact that the dude who wrote that article was apparently from the Department of Redundancy Department.

 

[shyly curious]

Gotta hate that.

Also gotta hate the fact that the dude who wrote that article was apparently from the Department of Redundancy Department.

in journalism they call it an "inverted pyramid" and is the normal way for journalists to write up a story if they don't know exactly how many column inches of space the editor will give the story.


-30-

 

[cookiejar]

I first thought of Kbate but I dont think shes near greece anymore or coming through the Czech Rep.

Maybe Slick was on it though.

lol

Prayers for all the passengers and their families and that remark about Slick was uncalled for KS but it is just what I would expect of you. My first thought was of him and his loved ones.

 

[RoryN]

Yahoo! News is reporting that 48 of the passengers were children.

 

[cookiejar]

Yahoo! News is reporting that 48 of the passengers were children.

I heard from Slick and yes there was a group of children traveling to Prague. He lost friends and aquaintances in the crash. My thoughts are with the families now.

 

[RoryN]

Maybe Slick was on it though.

lol

I heard from Slick and yes there was a group of children traveling to Prague. He lost friends and aquaintances in the crash.

Well, Killswitch - was that phenomenal "laugh out loud" joke worth it?

 

[linuxgeek]

src

Decompression Suspected in Greece Crash

August 14, 2005, 4:56 PM EDT

LONDON -- The Cypriot airliner that crashed Sunday in Greece, killing all 121 people on board, may have experienced a catastrophic loss of cabin pressure that rapidly starved the pilots of oxygen, aviation experts said.

At 34,000 feet, the co-pilot of the Helios Airways flight from Larnaca, Cyprus, was slumped over the controls and the captain was not in the cockpit, said the Greek air force, which sent two F-16 jets to intercept the airliner after it lost radio contact. Oxygen masks dangled inside in the cabin of the Boeing 737, a Greek government spokesman said.

"If the aircraft lost cabin pressure, either in the cockpit or the cabin, effectively everybody would be doomed within a short space of time," said Chris Yates, an aviation analyst at Jane's Transport.

"If the aircraft went into depressurization very quickly, you only have a few seconds before you lose consciousness, because you don't have any air to breathe at that altitude," Yates said.

Airplane cabins are pressurized so the air remains breathable at very high altitudes. If a plane suffers a loss of air pressure, the crew typically has enough warning to try to get to a lower altitude.

"It is one of these things that can be serious ... but if it occurs, there should be an automatic deployment of oxygen masks," said David Kaminski Morrow, deputy news editor of the British-based magazine Air Transport Intelligence.

"The crew get oxygen, passengers will be on oxygen, and there is enough in the tanks to get the aircraft to an altitude where you don't need the oxygen masks anymore," he added.

The crew would attempt to bring the plane down to an altitude of about 10,000 feet, where the air is breathable. This would typically be done over the sea rather than a mountainous area, Kaminski Morrow said.

"If the aircraft is at 30,000 feet you don't stay conscious for long, maybe 15 to 30 seconds. It is like standing on top of Mount Everest," Kaminski Morrow said.

Captain Denis Breslin, spokesman with the U.S. Allied Pilots Association, said that in Boeing planes, a warning horn and light notify pilots of a drop in pressure. "It's very loud and very noticeable."

He said American pilots are trained to take advantage of the "period of useful consciousness" -- no less than 10 to 15 seconds -- giving pilots enough time to put on their "quick don" oxygen masks, which cover the nose and the mouth.

A lack of oxygen apparently caused the 1999 crash that killed golfer Payne Stewart and four others aboard Stewart's twin-engine jet. The plane went down in a pasture in South Dakota after flying halfway across the United States on autopilot, as the five apparently became unconscious after the plane lost cabin pressure.

In this case, however, experts were puzzled by reports that passengers may have remained conscious longer than the pilots.

One passenger reportedly sent a text message before the crash to a relative, saying the pilots were unconscious and "here we're frozen" -- a reference to cold temperatures in the plane, indicating decompression.

Greek government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos said that when the F-16 pilots flew by the Helios Airways plane a second time, they saw two people apparently trying to take control of the Boeing 737. It was unclear whether they were passengers or pilots.

"The cabin pressure and the cockpit pressure are the same," said Yates, the Jane's analyst, noting that a failure should affect both equally.

"It's possible some of the passengers on board, because of their age, because of their health or whatever, may have been able to last a bit longer," he said.

 

[Ham Murabi]

The text message from the passenger to his brother 15 minutes before the plane crashed is interesting. He acknowledges that he's freezing, but he was concious. Is it possible one of the passengers who was still concious could have perhaps gotten into the cockpit, if it wasn't locked and deadbolted to keep out terrorists, and landed the plane?

 

[cookiejar]

"A transport official said all 115 passengers and six crew may have been dead when the plane went down."

We can only hope so.

 

[linuxgeek]

src

Greek Man Nabbed for Lying About Message

August 15, 2005, 3:17 PM EDT

THESSALONIKI, Greece -- Police in northern Greece on Monday arrested a man who claimed to have received a telephone text message from a passenger on board a Cypriot airliner that crashed north of Athens, killing 121 people.

Police identified the man as Nektarios-Sotirios Voutas, 32.

Voutas had called Greek television stations shortly after the Helios Airways flight crashed into a mountainous region north of the capital Sunday, saying his cousin, who he identified as Nikos Petridis, was on board.

He claimed his cousin had sent him a cell-phone text message minutes before the crash saying: "Farewell, cousin, here we're frozen."

The report that the plane was cold was taken as a sign of decompression -- one of the possible explanations authorities have given for the crash, which was Greece's deadliest. But police in Thessaloniki said they had determined he was lying, and there was no Petridis on the Cypriot government's official list of victims.

Voutas, a resident of the northern port city of Thessaloniki who had identified himself to Greek media as Sotiris Voutas, faced charges of disseminating false information and causing a public disturbance, police said. He was scheduled to appear in court for a preliminary hearing on Tuesday, they said.

 

[linuxgeek]

src

Greek Police Raid Helios Airways Offices

August 15, 2005, 3:34 PM EDT

ATHENS, Greece -- Police in Cyprus raided the offices of Helios Airways in the coastal city of Larnaca on Monday, a day after one of the company's passenger jets slammed into a mountainside near Athens, killing all 121 people on board.

Police spokeswoman Christalla Dimitriou said officers "carried out a search" after asking the city's court for a search warrant. No arrests were made and she did not say whether police had confiscated any material from the office.

Chief Athens coroner Fillipos Koutsaftis, meanwhile, said that tests conducted on the remains showed at least six of the 121 victims were alive when the aircraft went down.

"We have performed autopsies on six people. Our conclusion is they had circulation and were breathing at the time of death," Koutsaftis said, but he added they could have been unconscious.

French experts will examine the plane's black-box recorders, officials said.

The cause of Sunday's crash, Greece's deadliest airline disaster, appeared to be technical failure resulting in high-altitude decompression and loss of oxygen. Yet many questions remained, including why the co-pilot was unconscious in the cockpit 40 minutes before the crash and why he was alone, with the captain nowhere in sight.

The captain's body has yet to be recovered, and Greek investigators -- joined by a U.S. team -- were trying to determine why he was not in his seat while the Boeing 737 was in peril.

Coroners also will examine blood and tissue samples from victims' lungs to determine whether anything they breathed in could have caused their deaths.

"We will seek to determine when they died and how they died," chief Koutsaftis said earlier.

Victims' relatives gathered at a central Athens morgue to identify the remains.

There had been 21 children aboard Helios Airways flight ZU522 from Larnaca, Cyprus, to Athens, "all aged 4 and above," Greek deputy Health Minister Giorgos Constantopoulos said Monday. Initially, Greek and Cypriot officials had said 48 children were on the plane. No explanation was given for the discrepancy.

According the Cypriot government, at least 10 families with children were among the dead. Passengers and crew included at least 12 Greeks, one German -- the pilot -- and a four-member family of Armenian origin. The rest were Cypriot.

Police in northern Greece also arrested a man who claimed to have received a telephone text message from his cousin who was on the plane before it crashed.

The man, who was identified as 32-year-old Nektarios-Sotirios Voutas, called Greek television stations shortly after the Helios Airways flight crashed, saying his cousin Nikos Petridis sent him a message that read: "Farewell, cousin, here we're frozen."

The report that the plane was cold was taken as a sign of decompression, but police in Thessaloniki said they had determined he was lying and the name Petridis was not on the Cypriot government's official list of victims.

Voutas, a resident of the northern port city of Thessaloniki who had identified himself to Greek media as Sotiris Voutas, faced charges of disseminating false information and causing a public disturbance, police said.

The Boeing 737 had been scheduled to continue to Prague, Czech Republic, after Athens. It crashed while on autopilot at 12:05 p.m. Sunday near Grammatiko, a scenic village 25 miles north of the Greek capital, apparently after running out of fuel.

Greek state television had quoted the Cyprus transport minister as saying the plane had decompression problems in the past. But a Helios representative said the plane had "no problems and was serviced just last week."

Searchers at the crash site were still looking for three bodies, firefighting officials said Monday -- including the pilot. His name was Hans-Juergen Merten, 58, of Berlin, according to German authorities and his neighbors near the German capital's Schoenefeld airport.

The body of the Cypriot co-pilot, Pambos Haralambous, reportedly was found in the cockpit.

In Cyprus, Helios Airways Chairman Andreas Drakos said the airline's crews were operating normally on Sunday, rejecting earlier reports that its pilots and crew were refusing to fly.

The head of the Greek airline safety committee, Akrivos Tsolakis, said that the two recovered black boxes -- a data and cockpit voice recorder -- would be sent to French air safety investigators for examination. The voice recorder was badly damaged by the crash and ensuing fire.

"It's in a bad state and, possibly, it won't give us the information we need," Tsolakis said. "Both boxes will be sent to Paris where a French committee will help us and the foreign experts that are here to decode."

He said he believed his committee would be able to reach a conclusion "in a few days, a very few days."

U.S. experts will join Greek investigators on request by the American government, because the aircraft was manufactured in the United States, Tsolakis said.

The plane took off from Cyprus at 9 a.m. Sunday. About a half-hour later, the pilots reported air-conditioning system problems to Cyprus air-traffic control. Within minutes, the plane entered Greek air space over the Aegean Sea and shortly afterward lost all radio contact.

The Greek air force sent two F-16s fighter jets to intercept the plane. They caught up with the airliner at 34,000 feet and peered inside the cockpit. The jet pilots saw the co-pilot slumped over the controls but could not see the captain, and oxygen masks were dangling inside, government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos said.

When the jets flew by a second time they saw two people possibly trying to take control of the plane; it was unclear if they were crew members or passengers. The plane crashed 40 minutes later.

"When a pilot has no communication with the control tower, the procedure dictates that other planes must accompany and help the plane land. Unfortunately, it appeared that the pilot was already dead as was, possibly, everyone else on the plane," Cyprus Transport Minister Haris Thrasou said.

At 34,000 feet, the effects of depressurization are swift, said David Kaminski Morrow, of the British-based Air Transport Intelligence magazine.

"If the aircraft is at 30,000 feet, you don't stay conscious for long, maybe 15 to 30 seconds," he said.

Cyprus declared three days of national mourning, and in Athens flags were ordered to fly at half staff on Tuesday. A 40-day mourning period was declared in Paralymni, a Cypriot town of 10,000 that lost 16 of its residents on the plane.

 

[Sean]

There was an old gag on "Not the nine O'clock News" which went something like:
"A plane crash in Kazakhstan today killed four hundred people. Three Britons were involved. The others, in order of importance, were: 3 Americans, 4 Australians and a South African." An apt gag, don't you think?

 

[ruminator]

I heard from Slick and yes there was a group of children traveling to Prague. He lost friends and aquaintances in the crash. My thoughts are with the families now.

Please pass my condolences on to Slick and any friends or family.

....it's just a shame when something like this happens.

 

[cookiejar]

Please pass my condolences on to Slick and any friends or family.

....it's just a shame when something like this happens.

Thanks rumi I will, but I'm sure he will read this thread anyway.

 

[JustSkye]

Slick, I'm so very sorry for your loss. For everyone's loss.

 

[biggbear8]

Sending my condolences to slick for his friends and aquaintances also sending my thoughts and preays for everyone on the plane and their families .

handshakes Slick please take care

 

[Cathleen]

My sincere condolences for the losses of so many.

 

[Hooper_X]

"One of the pilots is blue. Farewell my cousin. We're all frozen ... to Howard Stern's balls" -- The Greek Capt. Janks.

 

[Phoenyx]

"One of the pilots is blue. Farewell my cousin. We're all frozen ... to Howard Stern's balls" -- The Greek Capt. Janks.

Turns out the text message was a fake.
The guy who claimed he got the message has admited to lying!

 

[KRCummings]

Turns out the text message was a fake.
The guy who claimed he got the message has admited to lying!

My question is, assuming they got their news at approx. the same time we did, how did he know they were freezing and the pilot was blue? The report of the txt msg came out at about the same time as the crash so either the guy knew something he shouldn't have or he was really, really fast with his lies.

 

[linuxgeek]

src

Missing Device Hampers Plane Crash Probe

August 16, 2005, 8:12 AM EDT

ATHENS, Greece -- Officials on Tuesday said they had found only the exterior container of the cockpit voice recorder from a Cypriot airliner crash that killed 121 people, hampering investigative efforts into the accident's cause.

Autopsies on the bodies of 20 people on board, including one flight attendant, show they were alive when the plane went down, an Athens coroner said Tuesday.

Nikos Kalogrias, one of a team of seven coroners, said the 20 victims' hearts and lungs were functioning when the plane crashed. "The attendant was alive and died of injuries" sustained in the crash, he said.

Private Greek television channel Mega reported that an autopsy on the co-pilot showed he was also alive at impact. Pilots of two Greek F-16 fighter jets had reported seeing the co-pilot slumped over the cockpit controls, apparently unconscious, shortly before the crash.

The voice recorder's internal components were ejected from the container when the plane crashed into a mountainous region north of Athens on Sunday, said Akrivos Tsolakis, the head of the Greek airline safety committee.

"The only fortunate event in the investigation is that we have the flight data recorder," Tsolakis said, adding that the box would be flown to Paris on Wednesday for decoding.

He said a group of investigators would search for the rest of the voice recorder. He said American experts, including a representative of the plane's manufacturer, were providing assistance.

The voice recorder picks up any conversation inside the cockpit but records only the last 30 minutes of sound. Because the airplane appeared to have been flying disabled for several hours, it wasn't clear how useful any recovered conversations would be for investigators.

Tsolakis said the bodies of the plane's Cypriot co-pilot and one of the flight attendant were found next to the wreckage of the cockpit.

The Helios Airways Boeing 737-300, with six crew and 115 passengers, plunged 34,000 feet into a mountainous area near the village of Grammatiko, 25 miles north of Athens. It had taken off in Cyprus and was heading for Prague, Czech Republic.

In Cyprus, police raided the offices of Helios Airways in the coastal city of Larnaca, near the international airport.

A search warrant was issued "to secure ... documents and other evidence which could be useful for the investigation into possible criminal acts," Cyprus' deputy presidential spokesman Marios Karoyian said.

Investigators also were trying to determine why the pilot was not in his seat shortly before the crash.

The pilots of the two F-16 fighter planes said they saw the co-pilot slumped over the controls. The pilot did not appear to be in the cockpit, and oxygen masks were seen dangling in the cabin.

The fighter jet pilots also saw two people possibly trying to take control of the plane; it was unclear if they were crew members or passengers.

The plane might have run out of fuel after flying for nearly three hours on autopilot, air force officials said, asking not to be named in line with Greek practice.

After the crash, authorities said it appeared to have been caused by a technical failure -- resulting in high-altitude decompression. A Cypriot transport official had said Sunday the passengers and crew may have been dead before the plane crashed.

Searchers were still looking for three bodies, including the plane's German pilot, fire officials said. Cypriot authorities identified him as Marten Hans Jurgen, 50, from Berlin.

A spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with German practice, identified one of the pilots as a 58-year-old German but would not give his full name. It was unclear why there was a discrepancy in his age. Greek and Cypriot authorities often list surnames before given names, and Hans-Juergen would likely be the pilot's first name.

In Berlin, police were guarding the house at the address where the Cypriot government said the pilot lived -- a gray stucco house surrounded by a tidy, tree-filled garden in a quiet Berlin neighborhood near the Schoenefeld airport.

The name on the mailbox said Merten. Neighbors confirmed his first name was Hans-Juergen and said he was a pilot in his 50s, but refused to provide any other details.

The airliner's pilots had reported air conditioning system problems about a half-hour after takeoff, and Greek state TV quoted Cyprus' transport minister as saying the plane had decompression problems in the past.

But a Helios representative said the plane had "no problems and was serviced just last week."

A man who claimed to have received a telephone text message from a passenger on the plane faced a preliminary hearing Tuesday for disseminating false information and causing a public disturbance.

Police on Monday arrested Nektarios-Sotirios Voutas, 32, who had called Greek television stations shortly after the crash. He claimed a cousin on board had sent him a cell-phone text message saying: "Farewell, cousin, here we're frozen."

The report that the plane was cold was taken as a sign of decompression -- one of the possible explanations authorities have given for the crash. But police said they determined the suspect's story was false.

 

[linuxgeek]

src

Attempt Said Made to Save Cypriot Plane

August 17, 2005, 2:01 PM EDT

ATHENS, Greece -- A crew member or passenger may have made a last, desperate attempt to save a Cypriot passenger jet before it crashed into a mountainside north of Athens, killing all 121 people aboard, Greek media reported Wednesday.

The reports came as families in Cyprus began burying victims of the Helios Airways crash Sunday. Investigators were trying to determine whether anything on board made the passengers and crew lose consciousness before the plane went down. They were also looking into prior reports of technical problems.

Two Greek air force F-16 jets scrambled after the Helios flight lost radio contact flew by the airliner over the Aegean Sea. The F-16 pilots reported seeing someone in the cockpit -- probably a man -- take control of the plane as is flew in a gradually descending holding pattern, apparently on autopilot, at about 37,000 feet near Athens airport.

That person then banked the plane away from Athens, lowering it first to 2,000 feet and then climbing back up to 7,000 feet before the plane apparently ran out of fuel and crashed, state-run NET television reported, quoting unnamed Defense Ministry sources.

Greek government and military officials refused to comment until the end of the investigation. Officials have not released any information about the last half-hour of the flight or what the F-16 pilots reported about how the plane crashed.

Relatives have said one of the flight attendants, 25-year-old Andreas Prodromou, had a pilot's license. But chief investigator Akrivos Tsolakis said only that someone on board other than the pilot and co-pilot was qualified to fly.

Coroners said the only identified flight attendant found near the wreckage was Louiza Vouteri. The plane went down near the village of Grammatiko, 25 miles north of Athens.

The F-16 pilots also reported seeing the co-pilot slumped on his seat, the pilot missing from his position and two other people in the cockpit, apparently trying to take control of the plane. It was unclear if that included the person which media reports said tried to fly the plane.

The mystery surrounding the cause of the plane crash and reports that the aircraft had past technical problems further angered grieving family members.

Relatives and politicians attending the funeral of co-pilot Pambos Haralambous in Cyprus demanded punishment for anyone found responsible for the disaster.

Haralambous' son, Yiannis, said his father, a flight engineer and pilot for 25 years, kept a detailed diary of his flights.

"He told me that if his diary was published then the company (Helios) would close," he said in a TV interview before the funeral. The diary was believed to be missing in the wreckage.

Autopsy results on 26 bodies showed that the passengers and at least two crew members -- including the co-pilot -- were alive when the plane crashed. Coroners hoped further tests would show whether toxic gases possibly had rendered them unconscious.

Coroners also said a 5-year-old boy was alive for a second after the plane went down. An autopsy on his burned body revealed he inhaled soot from a fire sparked by the crash; later tests showed he inhaled only a small amount of soot, consistent with drawing his last breath.

In a grizzly reminder of post-Sept. 11 concerns over suicide pilots, the aircraft was declared a "renegade" when it failed to respond to radio calls, government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos said.

While the move cleared the way for Prime Minister Costas Caramanlis to order the F-16s to shoot the plane down if it was deemed a threat, Greek officials have said this was not an option that the prime minister considered.

The flight from Larnaca to Athens was carrying 115 passengers -- including 20 children -- and six crew. Investigators were still searching for the remains of three people. Many of the bodies were burned beyond recognition from a brush fire sparked by the crash, and DNA analysis will be necessary for identification.

The plane's flight data recorder and the remains of the badly damaged voice recorder are being examined in Paris.

Investigators were also looking into claims that the plane had suffered technical problems in the past.

A former chief mechanic for Helios, Kyriakos Pilavakis, said the Boeing 737-300 had lost cabin pressure during a flight from Warsaw in December, after a door apparently was not sealed properly.

"The indications were that air had escaped from one of the doors -- the right door on the rear," Pilavakis told NET television.

Pilavakis, who said he resigned from the airline in January, gave six hours of testimony to investigators in Cyprus who have seized maintenance records and other documents from Helios.

Helios Managing Director Dimitris Pantazis insisted the plane was air-worthy.