The Strange Flight of Helios 522

This sounds like something right out of The Twilight Zone:

Most of the bodies recovered from the Cypriot plane that crashed into a mountain near Athens with 121 people on board were "frozen solid," a Greek Defense Ministry source said on Monday.

"Autopsy on passengers so far shows the bodies were frozen solid, including some whose skin was charred by flames from the crash," the source, with access to the investigation, told Reuters.

Early indications suggest the 115 passengers and six crew were dead or unconscious when the Helios Airways Boeing 737 plunged to earth on Sunday. There were no survivors.

Keep in mind that temperatures at 35,000 feet where this jet was flying are usually around -50 degrees, and anything exposed to those temperatures for very long would freeze in pretty short order. It appears that the plane suffered a sudden loss of pressurization which rapidly rendered the crew unconscious, though some passengers survived for awhile, probably using the supplemental oxygen supplied by the drop-down masks. The temperatures would have gotten them if the lack of oxygen didn't. On relative received a text message from a passenger:

"The F-16s also saw oxygen masks down when they got close to the aircraft. The aircraft was making continuous right-hand turns to show it had lost radio contact."

"A passenger on the doomed plane said in an SMS text to his cousin in Athens: "The pilot has turned blue. Cousin farewell, we're freezing."

I'm curious now as to how old the 737 was that was involved in this crash. This airline is fairly new, apparently the first private airline in Cyprus, but they may not have had the funds for new aircraft. They may have had to buy some old equipment that had seen better days. I'm sure the folks at Boeing are following this pretty closely.