Helios Airways Flight 522

Helios Airways Flight 522

5B-DBY, the Boeing 737-31S involved in the accident
Accident
Date	14 August 2005 (2005-08-14)
Summary	Crashed following crew incapacitation due to loss of pressurization
Site	Grammatiko, Marathon, Greece 38°13.894′N 23°58.214′E / 38.231567°N 23.970233°E / 38.231567; 23.970233
Aircraft
Aircraft type	Boeing 737-31S
Aircraft name	Olympia
Operator	Helios Airways
IATA flight No.	ZU522
ICAO flight No.	HCY522
Call sign	HELIOS 522
Registration	5B-DBY
Flight origin	Larnaca International Airport, Larnaca, Cyprus
Stopover	Athens International Airport, Greece
Destination	Prague Ruzyně Int'l Airport, Prague, Czech Republic
Occupants	121
Passengers	115
Crew	6
Fatalities	121
Survivors	0

On August 14, 2005, Helios Airways Flight 522 covered the route between Larnaca International Airport (Cyprus), and Ruzyně International Airport (Prague, Czech Republic), with a stopover in Athens (Greece). The aircraft, a Boeing 737, crashed on a mountain at 09:04 UTC on that day, near Grammatiko, 40 km north of Athens while on approach to Athens airport capital, killing all 115 passengers and 6 crew members on board.

It is the deadliest aviation disaster in Greek history.

Flight crew

The flight captain was Hans-Jürgen Merten, a 59-year-old pilot had a total of 16,900 flight hours, 5,500 of them on Boeing 737s.

The first officer was Pampos Charalambous, a 51-year-old Cypriot pilot who had flown exclusively on Helios for the last five years, accumulating 7,549 flight hours throughout his career, 3,991 of them on the Boeing 737.

Chronology

Passengers

The bodies of 118 people were recovered. The passenger list included 93 adults and 22 children. The passengers comprised 103 Cypriot nationals and 12 Greek nationals.

Cause

The cause of the accident was due to the fact that after takeoff, as the aircraft gained altitude, a failure when configuring the pressurization regulator caused the loss of consciousness of both the pilots and the passengers due to hypoxia, turning the aircraft into a "ghost flight" that was only kept flying by the operation of the autopilot. Finally, already over Greek territory, it hit a hill due to lack of fuel.

Other accidents

The accident was the largest in the history of Greek aviation, along with one of the most serious in August 2005, a dark month for commercial aviation, which also featured, among others, the tragedies of West Caribbean Airways Flight 708 and TANS Perú Flight 204.

References

Other websites

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Helios Airways Flight 522.

• "Helios Airways". Archived from the original on 13 August 2005.
• Weir, Andrew (Dec 19, 2006). "Behind Closed Doors". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077.
• Aircraft Incident Report of Helios Airways Flight HCY522 at Grammatiko, Greece on 14 August 2005 (published in English, released in November 2006) Archived 5 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine
• Complete report of the official investigation by the Greek air safety investigations committee (published in Greek, released in October 2006). Archived 2007-12-01 at the Wayback Machine