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Interesting article!

www.uniindia.com
Locked airline cockpits may add to dangers
Copyright Observer News
By Andrew Weir and David Leigh
London, December 21, 2006
Locked cockpits were supposed to make aircraft more secure. But as Andrew Weir and David Leigh discovered, there is growing evidence that this practice actually puts lives at risk
The story of the last hours of the passengers on Helios Airways flight HCY 522 is a strange and chilling one. It ended as a junior steward finally succeeded in breaking into the locked cockpit of the plane, where the two pilots sat unconscious. As circling fighter planes watched, the 25-year-old steward, Andreas Prodromou, clutched an oxygen bottle and fought to handle the controls. But he was too late: the fuel ran out, the engines died, and the Boeing 737-300 dived into a Greek hillside on August 14 last year, killing all 121 people on board.
According to evidence obtained by the London Guardian, these may have been the first lives claimed because of the worldwide decision to lock plane cockpit doors in the wake of the airborne terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11 2001.
Helios, which has ceased operating in the wake of the crash, was a cut-rate airline carrying British holidaymakers to and from Cyprus. With or without the locked cockpit door, it was the sort of airline that should not have been flying. The report of the Greek board of inquiry into the crash, recently published, paints a picture of a tiny, cheap company whose management was a shambles. The report quotes Helios’s chief operating officer, Bryan Field - who had joined the firm from British Airways two weeks before the crash - describing his concern at a ‘‘culture of fear where people were encouraged to stretch the rules to the limits’’. He added: ‘‘Aircraft utilisation was extremely high with ... inadequate downtime.’’
Helios’s Greek Cypriot owner, Andreas Drakou, is a British-based businessman. He helped launch Priceright, a British tour operator, before setting up Libra Holidays Group, which sells package tours to Cyprus. Helios had only four planes, and was run by a floating group of multinational crew and engineers, many on short-term seasonal contracts or obtained from agencies, the crash investigators found. The captain of the doomed plane, Hans-Jurgen Merten, 58, was a brusque German ‘‘of few words’’, and his Cypriot co-pilot, Pambos Paralambous, had a bad heart and a poor track record for carrying out vital checklists, according to a source close to the inquiry.
Cyprus did not take responsibility for the safety of the airline’s operations, leaving this supervision to Britain’s Civil Aviation Authority. But the CAA allowed Helios to carry on flying despite its grave safety weaknesses. On top of all this, the Greek report said, there was a design problem with the Boeing 737 that made it possible for pilots to confuse the meaning of a warning alarm. It gave the same intermittent blast for two different faults, depending on whether the plane was on the ground or in flight.
However, this hair-raising list of deficiencies might still have resulted in a safe outcome, had the door to the cockpit stayed open. Flight HCY 522 flew safely from London to Cyprus but reported a possible pressure problem with another door, before setting off again on its next leg to Prague. Helios technicians did a pressure check at Larnaca airport in Cyprus, but then failed to reset a crucial air conditioning switch from manual to auto. The pilots missed this error on their checklist. They set the autopilot and the plane computer to reach cruising height and head for a Greek radio beacon.
Within 13 minutes, as the plane climbed, the air pressure slowly dropped. The effects of hypoxia (oxygen starvation) are insidious. The pilots’ judgment became impaired without them realising it. Their radio calls to the ground made clear that they had misunderstood the true nature of the warning horn that was blaring on the flight deck.
There were only minutes to go before both pilots slipped into unconsciousness. In the main cabin, however, as the planeload of passengers settled down sleepily, the cabin crew suddenly had their first dramatic indication that something was wrong. What air crew call the ‘‘rubber jungle’’ - the forest of oxygen masks over the passengers’ seating - sprang down automatically as the air pressure reached danger levels. Yet the plane carried on climbing, instead of carrying out an emergency descent. The cabin staff were unable to walk in to talk to the pilots. If they had, they would have been able to give them crucial information, and the captain would have been alerted to don his own oxygen mask.
Instead, both pilots were sealed behind their bullet-proof door, in the grip of a fatal misunderstanding. They thought their electronics were overheating. Neither ever put on an oxygen mask, according to investigators.
No one will ever know exactly what happened next. All the cabin masks ran out of oxygen after 15 minutes, which is all the system allows for. But almost two hours later, as the plane flew on at 20,000ft (6,000m) with its cargo of unconscious people, the pilots of two Greek F-16 fighters scrambled to intercept the silent aircraft were astonished to see a young cabin steward get into the cockpit. He frantically shouted ‘‘Mayday’’ into the radio. Andreas Prodromou had a portable oxygen bottle, and had finally managed to operate the emergency keypad on the locked cockpit door. No one knows whether he had been trying codes at random, or had finally found the combination on the body of the senior steward, the only one permitted to know it.
In any event, he was far too late. A series of errors and mismanagement had brought about the crisis. But, as the sober language of the Greek investigation inquiry records, it should still have been possible for the cabin staff, had they not been locked out, to intervene even at the last moment. ‘‘The cabin crew plays an important role in the team resolution of developing problems,’’ it concluded.
A giant portrait of the Greek sun god was to be found eventually by search parties, painted on the remains of the tail of the Helios Boeing. It was serving as a tombstone for 121 people.
One question that remains is why the Greek crash inquiry report makes only guarded references to the dangers of locked cockpit doors. When published in Athens in October, it buried within the body of its analysis the disclosure that a key problem was ‘‘establishing and maintaining open communication between the cabin and the flight deck’’.
That lack of ‘‘open communication’’ during the flight turned out to be fatal. But the report’s conclusions on the cause of the Helios disaster solely blamed the pilots’ failure to notice the switch left in the wrong position.
Sources close to the Athens inquiry told the Guardian that there was an international consensus not to discuss the mechanics of security features such as locked doors because it might help terrorists. Aside from the fact that the chief steward was the only member of cabin staff allowed to know the emergency over-ride code to unlock the cockpit, Helios staff appeared to have been poorly aware of emergency procedures.
Disturbingly, there had already been related emergencies on other airlines. After a 2003 Ryanair episode with another Boeing 737, Irish investigators had warned of ‘‘the potential for a full-scale accident’’ in exactly the kind of pressurisation emergency that later caused the Greek crash. They said: ‘‘With the locked door policy endeavouring to solve one specific problem, it may be creating another one or more problems that could impinge on aviation safety ... The implications for flight safety in the specific scenario of flight crew hypoxia is not being addressed by a locked cockpit door policy. This is a ... problem.’’
Similarly in 2004, British investigators described how a fire broke out in the passenger cabin of a British Airways plane taking off from Heathrow. Cabin staff spent time desperately banging on the locked cockpit door to try to attract the pilots’ attention. The British investigation report warned that ‘‘both the flight crew and cabin crew were initially hampered in their efforts to deal with the incident promptly due to their inability to communicate with each other across the locked flight deck door.’’
Chris Roberts, a recently retired senior airline pilot and manager, told us: ‘‘With the locked cockpit door in place, communications are more difficult.’’ He says: ‘‘Some regulators and airlines have dealt with this adequately but in some cases there is still more work and more training needed.’’
By contrast, shortly before September 11 2001, when cockpit doors were still generally open, an Aer Lingus stewardess was able to save the day by rushing in three times to warn her captain that passenger oxygen masks had dropped. Air conditioning had inadvertently been switched off. The inquiry into that incident found that oxygen deprivation had probably confused the pilots: ‘‘The continued persistence of the [stewardess] in keeping the flight crew advised of the deteriorating cabin condition did, without doubt, contribute to the safe conclusion of this serious incident.’’
As late as January 2001, British Airways was adamant that locked doors were too dangerous to adopt. Following an incident in which a mentally ill passenger attacked the pilots of a jumbo jet, BA chief executive Rod Eddington said: ‘‘We will not be locking the door because it does not make sense ... Locking the door would cause more safety problems than it would solve.’’ But September 11 caused a panic reaction. Locked doors were hastily installed on planes all over the world despite a warning from the then US national transportation safety board vice-chairwoman, Carol Carmody. She said in May 2002: ‘‘We must be sure that crew communications during emergency systems are not compromised ... Access to the cockpit can be very important in an emergency.’’
The fate of HCY 522 was a tragic demonstration of the truth of those words.