Lost Souls of Grammatiko: The crash of Helios Airways flight 522

Note: this accident was previously featured in episode 32 of the plane crash series on April 14th, 2018, prior to the series’ arrival on Medium. This article is written without reference to and supersedes the original.

These immortal words, spoken again and again in futile expectation of a reply, have since come to embody one of history’s most haunting air disasters, one which played out in the sunny skies over Greece on the 14th of August, 2005. It was a catastrophe unlike almost any other: a Boeing 737 full of passengers, circling on autopilot off the coast of Athens, in complete radio silence with no one at the controls. In the windows, people lay slumped over, unmoving; the captain’s seat sat empty; and yet the engines continued to run, propelling the plane around and around until it ran out of fuel. Fighter jets followed it down, watching as it glided to its doom, when, to their amazement, a person appeared in the cockpit — a mysterious figure, not one of the pilots, who sat in the left seat and whispered desperate “mayday” calls until the end, unable to stop the plane from crashing. Who was this lonely soul still clinging to life aboard a ghost plane? What horrible fate had befallen the passengers and crew? These questions would haunt both Greece and the world, as investigators pieced together a sad tale of errors and missed opportunities which sent the 737 and its unconscious occupants gliding silently into the golden crown of Grammatiko Hill.

In the placid waters of the eastern Mediterranean, some one hundred kilometers from the coasts of Turkey and Syria, lies the island nation of Cyprus, the European Union’s most isolated member, and one of its smallest. Once an Ottoman territory, then a British colony, now an independent nation, Cyprus’s modern history has been marked by a tragic conflict between its Greek-speaking south and its Turkish-speaking north, leaving the island divided and quashing local dreams of being annexed by Greece or Turkey. Independent initially against its will, Cyprus has made do, becoming an alternative holiday destination despite the UN-demarcated no-man’s land which still snakes across the island and through the streets of its capital.

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