NEW YORK -- Neither the German pilot nor the Cypriot co-pilot of an airliner that crashed Aug. 14 near Athens could speak the same language fluently, and each had difficulty understanding the other's English, the International Herald Tribune reported in an article published in Wednesday editions of the New York Times.
The Herald Tribune, citing several people connected with the investigation into the crash, said the crew members of the Cypriot airliner became confused by a series of alarms as the plane climbed, failing to recognize that the cabin wasn't pressurizing until they grew mentally disoriented because of lack of oxygen and lost consciousness.
A total of 121 people were killed in the crash after the plane climbed and flew on autopilot, circling near Athens until one engine stopped running because of a lack of fuel. The sudden imbalance of power, with only one engine operating, caused the autopilot to disengage and the plane to begin to fall, according to the newspaper report.
Investigators pieced together the story of the crash from many sources, the Herald Tribune said. Among other things, the investigators determined that the pilot wasn't in his seat because he was up trying to solve a problem that turned out to be one of the lesser threats facing the plane, the newspaper reported.
The plane that crashed, a Boeing 737-300, underwent maintenance the night before. The maintenance crew apparently left a pressurization controller rotary knob out of place, according to the officials connected to the investigation, and the crew didn't catch the mistake during preflight checks the next day. This meant that the plane couldn't pressurize properly, the Herald Tribune said.
At 10,000 feet, an alarm went off to warn the crew that the plane wouldn't pressurize. Crew members mistakenly thought that the alarm horn was a warning to tell them that their controls weren't set properly for takeoff, the officials told the Herald Tribune.
The climb continued on autopilot. At 14,000 feet, oxygen masks deployed as designed, and a master caution light illuminated in the cockpit. Another alarm sounded at about the same time on an unrelated matter, warning that there was insufficient cooling air in the compartment housing avionics equipment, the newspaper said.
The radio tapes showed that this created tremendous confusion in the cockpit. Normally an aircraft cabin is held at 8,000 feet pressure, so the crew at over 14,000 feet would already be experiencing some disorientation because of a lack of oxygen, the newspaper reported.
During this time, the captain and co-pilot discovered that they had no common language and that their English wasn't good enough for the complicated technical conversation required to fix the problem, according to the report.
The crew members called the maintenance base in Cyprus and were told that the circuit breaker to turn off the loud new alarm was in a cabinet behind the captain. The captain got up from his seat to look for the circuit breaker, apparently ignoring the confused co-pilot.
As the plane continued to climb on autopilot, the air grew so thin that the crew became seriously impaired. The captain lost consciousness first on the floor of the cockpit, followed by the co-pilot, who remained in his seat, according to the officials who spoke to the Herald Tribune.
The autopilot did as it was programmed to do, flying the plane at 34,000 feet to Athens and entering a holding pattern. It remained in a long circling pattern, shadowed by Greek military jets, until fuel ran low and one engine quit, according to the report.
