In the cockpit, the captain’s chair was empty, and the co-pilot was slumped over in his seat motionless and unresponsive. The jets approached Flight 522 at 11:24 and circled around trying to get a view within the passenger plane. Two F-16 fighter aircraft from the Hellenic Air Force 111th Combat Wing were scrambled from Nea Anchialos Air Base and sent to intercept and investigate the renegade plane, as it was now being feared that a terrorist attack was in motion. At 10:40, the aircraft entered the holding pattern for Athens Airport and circled around as if preparing to land, and throughout all of this numerous attempts to establish radio contact were met with silence. From here would begin the strange and sad saga of a doomed plane that would go on to become known as the “ghost plane.”Īt this point, when communications were lost and that airline was just flying around, the operations room on the ground was in major crisis mode, and had become a hive of activity as they scrambled to try and figure out what was going on. When it then entered Greek airspace without any further word, the flight was declared to be “renegade” and it would only get stranger from there. However, the plane kept flying normally as if nothing had happened. Where are my equipment cooling circuit breakers?” When the engineer on the ground asked “Can you confirm that the pressurization panel is set to auto?” there was no response, and all communication was lost. The ventilation cooling fan lights are off. Cooling equipment normal and alternate off line. Indeed, the take-off was flawless and everything was going fine as the aircraft climbed, but shortly before the plane entered Greek airspace there was an eerie transmission received from the flight by the Helios operations centre on the ground, in which the captain said, “The take-off configuration warning on.
It was a short flight, with an experienced captain in 35-year veteran pilot Hans-Jürgen Merten, so there would have been no reason to suspect that the flight would be anything other than smooth and routine. the plane took off from Larnaca with 115 passengers on board and a crew of 6 for what was to be just a short flight over to their stopover at Athens. On August 14, 2005, Helios Airways Flight 522 was scheduled to fly from Larnaca, Cyprus to Prague, in the Czech Republic, with a stopover to Athens, Greece. It would seem that air travel is a realm rife for all manner of unsolved mysteries. Ever since we have ventured up into the skies above there have long been been plenty of mysteries infusing all that we do.
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