737 Crash Near Athens

[VampyreGTX]

I see that you also fly the 182 RG. Now that you mention it, I have noticed the same temperatures at this time of year at FL 350. Very suspicious.

What does my flying a 182RG have anything to do with what I know about weather? I was using STANDARD temp decrease per a given altitude. Just pulling up the various winds aloft forecasts for different sectors of the US for today, I'm showing a temp of -41 to -50 for FL340, even colder than what I estimated. There was also a UA flight over texas about an hour ago that has a pirep listing the temp at FL380 of -50.... and another over Kansas at FL330 of -41.

Weather was one of my strong points during my training and I've studied up a lot of weather forecasting in the last few years.

Now how can a human body freeze completely when exposed to -40* for 1.5 hours? At around -44* F. (almost identical point for C readings) human flesh can freeze in as little time as one minute. Factors like stored energy, your own natural heating (from metabolism differences), movement (shivering alone increase natural heat production 5 fold) etc. will effect this. However, I doubt any of the passengers were dressed for anything colder than 70 or so, given they were flying from Cypress to Athens. So the people moving around the cabin, may have lasted longer in the cold, while those that remained in their seats, or lost consciousness early, did in reality freeze to the bone. Also, peoples metabolism in warm climates cannot handle the extra heating requirements of extreme cold temps. Compare the metabolism of a resident of alaska or siberia to someone from cypruss, and I guarantee you they will handle extreme cold much differently.

 

[Swede]

-

-It was a reletively short flight from Cyprus to Athens, and the plane was only cruising at 34,000'. TUC for a healthy adult is almost a minute there, and it isn't that cold.

TUC varies with the rate of depressurization. If it's explosive, it's MUCH faster than a gradual depressurization. There was a C141 a while back where I believe 3 out of 4 guys in or near the cockpit didn't get the masks on in time, and the 4th guy BARELY got his on. Guy #4 saved the ship and all their lives. I need to look up details, I'm just going by memory right now.

 

[CrewResearch]

737 crash near ATH

I just read the following on the Washington Post website. Any opinions on the issues raised here?

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Greek Crash Puzzles U.S. Aviation Experts



[size=-1]By LESLIE MILLER
The Associated Press
Monday, August 15, 2005; 8:16 PM
[/size]

WASHINGTON -- U.S. aviation experts say they can't understand the behavior of the flight crew aboard a Cypriot airliner that crashed north of Athens after flying on autopilot for what could have been hours.

Early reports indicated the Helios Airways jet lost cabin pressure. Temperatures and oxygen levels would have plummeted and left everyone aboard unconscious and freezing to death as the plane flew on autopilot long before it crashed, experts said Monday.

But if there had been a sudden decompression, experts say, the pilots and the flight attendants for some reason didn't react the way they were trained to.

"It's odd," said Terry McVenes, executive air safety chairman for the Air Line Pilots Association, International. "It's a very rare event to even have a pressurization problem and in general crews are very well trained to deal with it."

The plane was fairly new, a Boeing 737-300 delivered in January 1998, according to company spokesman Jim Proulx. The flight data recorder that came with the aircraft records 128 kinds of data about the plane, he said.

Investigators were sending the plane's data and cockpit voice recorders to France for expert examinations.

The aircraft flew into Greek airspace, but air traffic controllers couldn't raise the pilots on the radio and fighter jets intercepted the plane, flying at 34,000 feet.

The fighter pilots saw that the airline pilot wasn't in the cockpit, the co-pilot was slumped over his seat and oxygen masks dangled, government spokesman Theodoros Roussopoulos said. He said the air force pilots also saw two people possibly trying to take control of the plane.

It is that sequence of events that puzzles aviation experts.

Warnings should go off if an airliner suddenly loses pressure, and pilots are trained to immediately put their oxygen masks on and dive to about 12,000 feet, where there's enough oxygen for people to breathe, they say.

If a cabin loses pressure suddenly, passengers and flight crew have only seconds to put on oxygen masks before losing consciousness. Death would follow quickly.

The chief Athens coroner, though, said at least six of the victims were alive at the time of the crash.

The pilots also didn't report any windows out or holes in the fuselage, the most likely causes of a catastrophic loss of pressure, said Bill Waldock, an aviation safety professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Arizona.

Another clue to a sudden pressure loss would have been frost on the windows because it's so cold at 34,000 feet, said Waldock.

If the fighter pilots could see into the cockpit, the windows couldn't have been iced over, as they were in the 1999 crash of a Learjet 35 that killed golfer Payne Stewart. Investigators blamed that crash on a sudden decompression.

Paul Czysz, emeritus professor of aerospace engineering at St. Louis University, wonders why the co-pilot was slumped over.

"He couldn't have been unconscious for a small decompression at 34,000 feet," Czysz said. "Something's amiss."

The pilot and the co-pilot would have had five times as much oxygen as the passengers, he said.

"Even if the pressurization system was failing, it doesn't fail instantaneously. Even if it goes fast, you can seal the cabin, you've got all the oxygen in the cabin to breathe, you've got the masks and you've got plenty of time to get to 12,000 feet," Czysz said.

Jim Hall, former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said it's possible the oxygen in the cockpit failed. He noted that the NTSB has been concerned about the ability of pilots to get their masks on quickly enough.

"The accident did not have to occur," Hall said. "It has to be either a training issue or an equipment issue."

He's worried that the answer won't be found because the cockpit voice recorder probably recorded over itself after 30 minutes. Since the plane was in the air on autopilot for so long, it probably won't provide any information, he said.

© 2005 The Associated Press

 

[Sam Snead]

So... there was no action taken on the part of the flight deck crew to initiate ANY sort of descent.... but if a fuel fire ensued after the impact, then the descent was not caused by absolute starvation.

I am ignorant of the fuel system in the 737-300, but is the prevailing theory now that they ran some tanks dry, which flamed out the engines, causing the eventually catastrophic descent?

And what was the reason the flightcrew was incapacitated but there were "people in the cockpit attempting" to do something; flight attendants? Deadheading pilots?

I was interested to read all the posts about the FMC, VNAV, etc, but is it anyone's opinion that one of the aforementioned "people" were monkying around with the yoke and goodness knows what else?

What's more, the statement about "frozen solid" bodies sounds bogus. I'm sure the body parts were cold, perhaps even very cold. But I doubt the coroner had already conducted autopsies and sliced through some part and seen ice crystals.

Please correct errors in my logic and my minimal memory of all 77 posts on this topic.

 

[ms6073]

but if a fuel fire ensued after the impact, then the descent was not caused by absolute starvation.

I am ignorant of the fuel system in the 737-300, but is the prevailing theory now that they ran some tanks dry, which flamed out the engines, causing the eventually catastrophic descent?.

Without adding to the speculation, I do not think the basic fuel systems for the various 737 series aircraft have changed much over the years. Here is a link to a fuel system schematic that should apply to a -300 series aircraft: http://www.b737.org.uk/schemefuel.gif

Here is a link to a site that has a moderate amount of systems information for the various 737 systems (including the fuel system): http://www.b737.org.uk/fuel.htm

 

[User546]

Isd this common in most airline crashes? Maybe it is, but I've never heard of a CVR being ejected out of its container. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me considering there was enough lack-of-force to have decent sizes of human remains, yet the impact was great enough to rip the CVR apart? But I know nothing about this, so someone educate me on it.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/08/16/greece.crash/index.html

Officials on Tuesday said they had found only the exterior container of the cockpit voice recorder from the plane, hampering investigative efforts into the accident's cause.

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

"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 told AP that American experts, including a representative of the plane's manufacturer, were providing assistance.

 

[Simon Says]

Here is an idea of why the windows were not iced up........If the window heat was on would the windows frost up on the inside......hmmmm. I don't know?

We fly around without our window heat unless we are in icing conditions, but in the past we used to always turn the window heat on on the "After start checklist"

Any 737 guys out there have an answer to this?

 

[User546]

Here is an idea of why the windows were not iced up........If the window heat was on would the windows frost up on the inside......hmmmm. I don't know?

Wouldn't the cabin windows have frozen up regardless?

 

[ms6073]

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

Sounds like the ramblings of a talking head who really does not completely understand the related complexities about which he is being asked. Now I do not completely understand the Data recorders used on the accident aircraft but I do know that although designed to withstand extreme conditions, typically the 'contents' of the data recorders end up in disarray. Ideally we like to think the recorders come out the aircraft and are taken to the lab for analysis where the recording apparatus is immediately plugged into a machine that will play back the recorded data but most of the time that simply is not the case.

Unlike recorders used before the digital age, the type of data recorders on the accident aircraft used a recording media similar to the hard drives found in most home and office computers. Now the flight data recorder uses data streams from various sources allowing for the recording of numerous parameters (128 in this case) and allows for very long periods of recorded data. Voice is different because without some sort of voice compression algorythm in concert with large storage media, recording voices on that type of recorder is limited by the size of the storage media. That does not mean the data is lost, just that the voice recorder will begin overwriting older data so if the event leading up to an accident occured more than the specified 'loop' time for the recorder, the older voice data gets progressively overwritten by newer voice data. Speculating here, but I am under the impression that like a hard drive on a home computer, even though voice data gets overwritten, the voice data can still be retrieved for the recorder in the accident but takes a considerable longer amount of time. Even then, the older voice data may not be very useable due to the techniques used to restore the data.

All of this makes the assumption that the data recorder is in good condition but typically such events result in damage to the data recorders as a result of impact forces and heat from post impact fire. For example the hard drive case may split open resulting in damage to the magnetic recording. But even if the media is completely expelled from its container, all is not lost because like a hard drive from a home computer, a technician can then attempt to insert the media from the accident recorder into the mechanism of a functioning unit so that the data can be played back and recorded on other media for further review. Depending on how much abuse the magnetic media from a recorder experiences during the accident will dictate how much time technicians will need to get a usueable playback of the data.

 

[habubuaza]

The more information that comes out the stranger this accident is becoming.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050817/ap_on_re_eu/greece_plane_crash

 

[EAP]

Here is an idea of why the windows were not iced up........If the window heat was on would the windows frost up on the inside......hmmmm. I don't know?

We fly around without our window heat unless we are in icing conditions, but in the past we used to always turn the window heat on on the "After start checklist"

Any 737 guys out there have an answer to this?

Window heat is always on in the 737, at least in every airline I've flown the airplane at.

 

[NYCPilot]

Some new info on the 737 crash in Greece.

Apparently a male flight attendant aboard who was learning to fly may have been the one in the cockpit making "may day" radio calls. Albeit, on the wrong frequency. Recent evidence also speculates that the pilots incorrectly handled the depressurization, believing the warning horn that sounded was for a malfunctioning flap.

http://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/23/Worldandnation/In_Greece_crash__new_.shtml