“ Procedures were not completely followed,” said Boeing’s then CEO, Dennis Muilenburg, at a news conference in April 2019. In the immediate wake of these crashes, involving newer planes, Boeing suggested the blame lay with the pilots. This has played out in the recent catastrophic crashes of two Boeing 737 Maxs. But the rituals of disaster also involve a blame game, with a tendency to point to human error. It is based on the principle that what we learn from one accident can help prevent another. When a plane crashes, each twisted and charred fragment is painstakingly located, mapped and tagged, with findings submitted to investigating boards who probe and question, and draw conclusions. T here is a ritual to aviation disasters. A fireball destroyed several acres of scrub and pasture land. There were 115 passengers, from Greece, Cyprus and Australia, and six crew. We’ll phone if we need you.’”Īt 9.03am, flight 522 crashed into a hillside near the village of Grammatiko, 25 miles from Athens, killing everyone on board. “It was decided I couldn’t be of any use,” Irwin says. As the news of the impending disaster spread, the operations room filled up. In another 20 minutes, flight 522 would crash.

Irwin calculated that it had taken off with enough fuel to be in the air for around three hours.

I just take the information and work through it.” The plane, now on autopilot, was circling over Athens, as if waiting for permission to land.

“Engineers aren’t particularly reactive people. “Everyone was thinking terrorism,” Irwin says. The office had received a chilling report from two jets scrambled by the Hellenic air force to intercept the plane: the captain’s seat was empty the person in the first officer’s seat was slumped over the controls the only three passengers visible were motionless, wearing oxygen masks and masks were dangling from overhead units. It was now more than two hours since takeoff and the plane was still in the air, with 121 people on board. The flight time was one hour and 45 minutes. Flight 522 had taken off from Larnaca for Athens at 6.07am. They had lost radio contact with one of their planes. “Sometimes the engineering manager just wanted to chat about the flying programme or shift patterns,” he says.īut Irwin found the operations room in crisis. It was the operations centre at Helios asking Irwin to go into the office. It was the school holidays and his family were over from Bedfordshire, where they lived during term time. That day, Irwin had started work at 1am, finished at around 6.30am and was planning to take his children to the beach. “My lad used to stand on a plastic box the size of a top hat to take his pool shot,” he remembers. A pool table stands in the open-plan living room. “The work was interesting and the quality of life fabulous,” he says, from the home he designed and built himself in Bedfordshire. On some days he was needed for only a few hours. Irwin’s job was to do the “turnarounds”: checking the plane over after it arrived and ensuring it was safe to take off again. Helios was based at Larnaca airport and had three aircraft – all Boeing 737s.

Small and trim, with wavy hair, he had an affable, hands-on manner his managers liked. He was a familiar face, having worked there in 2002. That April, Helios Airways, the low-cost Cypriot airline, hired Irwin for six months.

Helios flight 522