They could not visualise the captain his seat was empty. The fighter pilots saw the co-pilot slumped over the controls in the cockpit, motionless. Two Greek F-16 air force jets were scrambled to investigate the situation, and they reported witnessing a disastrous sight over the Aegean Sea. The 737 plane continued on autopilot, and was declared “renegade” when it failed to make radio contact upon entering Greek airspace. Flight 522, which was scheduled to fly from Larnaca to Prague via Athens, included passengers from Greece, Cyprus and Australia.ĭuring the flight, the crew became incapacitated due to what investigators later discovered was a loss of cabin pressurisation. It was early on the morning on August 14 when 121 people boarded the Helios Airways Boeing 737 plane. Ajet expects some 250,000 return passengers for the first year of operation, increasing to around 500,000 by 2008.On this weekend back in 2005, tragedy struck a passenger plane near Greece. The airline flies two leased Boeing 737-800s, and a third is scheduled for delivery in the spring of 2007. The staff have been redeployed, Field said. The company plans to shut its reservations office by the end of March as it switches to ticketless travel. What we are trying to do is to secure our business through charter operations, and that allows us to allocate the balance of our seats at lower fares to travelers,» he said. «Cyprus is underserved when it comes to low-fare operators. «Effectively we will be using the same type of low-fare model as you would see in the UK, for example,» said Field, who worked with British Airways for 33 years and was formerly a director of BA’s CitiExpress. «They stayed with us… but what they had said was that, going forward, a different identity would be helpful.» Most of ajet’s capacity will be allocated to charter operators, and the balance of seats will be made available to the public online. «The majority of our business is UK-based, and after the tragic accident none of the tour operators from the UK deserted us,» Field said. The plane, trailed by two Greek fighters when the plane lost radio contact, smashed into a mountain north of Athens after running out of fuel. The airline’s Boeing 737-800, flying from Larnaca in Cyprus to Prague, was on autopilot for more than two hours after a suspected faulty decompression system rendered its two pilots unconscious, leaving a steward with a trainee pilot’s license grappling at its controls. Greek authorities are expected to release their findings about the accident in April. They were delayed as a result of the accident,» Field said. «The (conversion) plans were there well before the accident. Libra has dismissed suggestions that the changeover to a charter operation was spurred by the barrage of bad publicity the airline got in the wake of the August crash, the worst to hit either Greece or Cyprus. Field said ajet was in the final stages of acquiring its licenses, with an estimated starting date of March 25. A tour operator really needs a charter-type airline,» Field told Reuters in an interview. «A scheduled airline doesn’t really fit with the type of business that Libra represents. Field said the group had plans to convert the business model of the carrier before the crash. Cyprus-listed Libra, a UK operator specializing in Cyprus, acquired Helios in December 2004. New company ajet will take over Helios’s aircraft and operate primarily as a charter operator to complement other activities of holding company Libra, said ajet Managing Director Bryan Field. Helios, a subsidiary of the Libra Holidays Group, will remain as a legal entity but without operations while it awaits the results of investigations into the crash in Greece last August 14, in which 121 people were killed. NICOSIA – Cyprus’s Helios Airways, afflicted by the worst aviation disaster in Europe last year, is to wind down as a scheduled airline and convert to a low-cost charter carrier with a new name, executives said yesterday.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |