#Helios airways manual
#Helios airways full
#Helios airways trial

However, the engineer failed to reset it to 'auto' after completing the checking.Īfter the aircraft was returned into service, the flight crew overlooked the pressurisation system state on three separate occasions: during the pre-flight procedure, the after-start check, and the after take-off check. In order to carry out this check without requiring the aircraft's engines, the pressurisation system was set to 'manual'.

#Helios airways full

They requested a full inspection of the door. The inspection was carried out by a ground engineer who then performed a pressurization leak check. That morning, the aircraft arrived from London and the previous flight crew had reported a frozen door seal and abnormal noises coming from the right aft service door. He has 7,549 flight hours throughout his career, with 3,991 of them on the Boeing 737. The first officer was Pampos Charalambous, a 51-year-old Cypriot pilot who had flown exclusively for Helios for the past five years. The captain of the flight was Hans-Jürgen Merten, a 59-year-old German contract pilot hired by Helios for holiday flights, who had been flying for 35 years (previously for Interflug before 1990) and had accrued a total of 16,900 flight hours, including 5,500 hours on the Boeing 737. It was the deadliest aviation accident in Greek history. The aircraft was left to fly on autopilot until it ran out of fuel and crashed near Grammatiko, Greece. It crashed on 14 August 2005, following loss of pressure that incapacitated the crew, killing all 121 passengers and crew on board. Helios has strongly denied that it cut corners in air safety, saying all its pilots were fit to fly and subject to the appropriate checks.Helios Airways Flight 522 was a flight from Larnaca, Cyprus to Prague, Czech Republic with a stopover to Athens, Greece.

#Helios airways manual

In October 2006, a Greek commission of inquiry said the Helios pilots had failed to recognize early warnings of a drop in cabin pressure and had neglected to switch pressurization from manual to automatic in pre-flight checks. The plane ran out of fuel after flying on autopilot for several hours. Families of the dead have long called for criminal action against those deemed responsible for the Helios Airways Boeing 737-300 being starved of oxygen and then slamming into a hillside outside Athens in August 2005. «We want to see justice done in the courtroom and the court to deliver the justice we’ve been waiting for these past four years,» the leader of the Helios relatives group, Nicolas Yiasoumis, told reporters. The accused are being held responsible for the death of 119 of those on board – excluding the two pilots who are deemed partly to blame for the crash, which was the deadliest aviation disaster for both Greece and Cyprus. State prosecutors are charging them with manslaughter and causing death by a reckless act on the grounds that they hired «unsuitable and inadequate» pilots.

#Helios airways trial

They appeared before a Nicosia district court yesterday where their case was committed to trial on September 17 when they will be asked to enter a plea, defense lawyers said.

The five accused are Helios Chief Executive Andreas Drakos, Managing Director Dimitris Pantazis, Operations Manager George Kikides, Chief Pilot Ianko Stoimenov and Helios Airways itself as a legal entity. Helios Airways and four officials face a total of 1,190 counts of manslaughter and reckless endangerment in what promises to be one of the most complex and high-profile cases in Cypriot legal history. Four people and defunct Cyprus budget carrier Helios Airways will go on trial in September over the island’s worst air crash, which killed all 121 people on board in 2005, a Nicosia court said yesterday.