“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. He had worked in Kuwait, China, Malaysia, the Middle East, Africa, Mexico, Miami. The work suited him: it was well paid, and he liked to travel. Irwin went on to work for airlines such as McAlpine Aviation and Monarch, and by 2005 had been a freelance licensed engineer for 15 years.
“I enjoy being around machines,” Irwin says. Irwin was an aircraft engineer he had become obsessed with the technical aspects of planes as a young man in the Royal Air Force, following in the footsteps of his father, also an aircraft engineer and pilot. It was a convenient base, only minutes from the airport. E arly on the morning of 14 August 2005, Alan Irwin, then 44, was with his partner, Donna, and their two young children in an apartment in Larnaca, Cyprus.
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