After the plane crashed, killing all six people aboard, the NTSB said, “The probable cause of this accident was incapacitation of the flight crew members as a result of their failure to receive supplemental oxygen following a loss of cabin pressurization, for undetermined reasons.” Even when a ghost flight is watched on its way to inevitable demise, the basic mystery of what went wrong often remains intact. All they saw were dark windows, opaque with ice. Fighter jets were soon dispatched to determine a problem. The jet took off from Northwest Florida on its way to Dallas, and trouble struck quickly with the first unacknowledged contact coming 14 minutes after departure. Two crew members and four passengers, including 45-year-old golfer Payne Stewart, died in a ghost plane incident that ended in a field outside Aberdeen, South Dakota. Investigations said the passengers were alive but unconscious at the time of the crash, though some Greek officials believe many passengers froze to death during the flight. The plane was out of gas and it crashed into a mountain outside of Athens. A moment of hope emerged when a flight attendant, still conscious after using several crew oxygen containers, made his way into the cockpit and took the plane’s controls. The 737’s pilots were slumped over their controls and passengers were wearing oxygen masks. Unresponsive to radio communication, the jet flew into Greek airspace, where two F-16s intercepted it. Even after oxygen masks dropped to passengers, the plane continued its climb. Alarms sounded onboard but the pilots, beginning to feel the effects of hypoxia, misinterpreted them. Instead, pressure started dropping 13 minutes into the Cyprus-to-Prague flight. Investigations after the crash showed that the flight crew had several opportunities to notice and correct the setting, but they never did. The system was never switched back to auto. The problem with this 737 began when ground crew set the plane’s pressurization system to manual to check a reported leak. Human error was the root of this terrifying 2005 ghost flight that crashed outside of Athens and killed all 121 people onboard. The stories of five previous ghost planes shed light on what might have happened here. It wouldn’t be the first time such an event has brought down an aircraft. Before the landing could be executed, the theory goes, the crew was incapacitated, leaving a plane full of dead and dying people that flew itself west over the Indian Ocean until it ran out of fuel and dropped from the sky. Once the plane is found - thanks to satellite flight-path analysis, investigators have an idea of where to look - the investigation will turn to why the plane flew on autopilot until it couldn’t fly anymore.Ī lot of what we know supports the theory that MH370 was a ghost plane - specifically, that a fire or depressurization or some other catastrophic event forced the pilot to attempt an emergency landing, which would explain the mysterious westward turn made by the Boeing 777. There’s precious little certainty about what happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 after it left the ground in Kuala Lumpur, but as the Washington Post reported this morning, there’s “a new consensus among investigators” that the plane flew a steady route across a little-traveled corridor of the Indian Ocean before running out of fuel and crashing. Helios 522 became a ghost plane and crashed near Athens.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |