Featured Image Credit: Milos Bicanski / Stringer / Getty
In the summer of 2005, Greece witnessed one of its worst accidents in aviation history.
Years later, the chilling words of a fighter pilot who witnessed the plane crash have resurfaced online.
In August of that year, Greece was shaken by the crash of Helios Airways Flight 522, which killed all 115 passengers and six crew members on board.
The flight was scheduled to depart from Larnaca, Cyprus at 9am on 14 August and fly to Prague, Czech Republic, with a stopover in Athens.
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The onboard pilots reported an air conditioning warning to ground staff shortly after takeoff. But that was the last anyone heard from them.
When air traffic control (ATC) in Cyprus lost contact with the aircraft operating the flight, concerns arose about potential hijacking or terrorism.
But what they discovered was far more unsettling.
Fighter jets were sent to locate Flight 522 which was circling aimlessly over Athens.
They soon realised that the first officer was slumped at the controls and the captain's seat was worryingly vacant.
Inside the cabin, passengers were unconscious, despite oxygen masks dangling in front of them.
All onboard were alive but unconscious, except for flight attendant Andreas Prodromou, who - though not trained to fly a Boeing 737-31S - was desperately trying to steer the plane to safety.
The fighter jet pilots were watching helplessly as the 'ghost flight' struck the mountainside in was resulted as a tragedy.
It was found that after almost three hours in the air, the aircraft's engines failed within 10 minutes of each other.
In his final moments, Prodromou pointed down to the fighter pilots before the plane crashed into a hillside near Grammatiko, Greece.
One of the fighter pilots' haunting words from the crash was later shared online.
In the audio, the pilot can be heard saying to the ground crew: "Mayday, mayday. Mambo, we have a civilian plane crash. We have a civilian plane crash. Mayday, mayday.
"Mayday, mayday. Athens, the civilian plane crashed into a mountain peak."
An investigation after the crash revealed that the incident was due to a loss of cabin pressure, causing hypoxia for everyone onboard.
Following that, it was believed that the aircraft's cabin pressurisation switch had been left mistakenly in 'manual' mode rather than 'auto' - which would have caused the depressurisation of the aircraft.
Helios Airways ceased operations in 2006.
