THE team investigating last month’s aircraft crash in Greece in which 121 people died are to fly to London to interview the British engineers who checked the aircraft before its doomed flight.

Alan Irwin, one of the engineers, left Cyprus after his name was leaked to the media. “He is refusing to come to Cyprus for safety reasons,” Harris Thrassou, the Cypriot Transport Minister, said.

Mr Irwin cleared the aircraft for take-off on August 14 after being unable to find the cause of a fault reported by the crew who had flown the jet from London to Cyprus on its penultimate journey.

He is also believed to be the last person to have had radio contact with the aircraft’s German pilot, who had reported an air-conditioning problem seven minutes after take-off from Cyprus. The aircraft was bound for Prague via Athens.

Controllers lost contact with it shortly afterwards. Investigators believe that the pilot and co-pilot lost consciousness, possibly after the air pressure system and the back-up oxygen supply failed. The aircraft flew on autopilot for almost another three hours before running out of fuel and crashing into a hill north of Athens.

Mr Irwin, who had taken his family to Cyprus for the summer to work under contract for Helios, the Cypriot airline that operated the Boeing 737, will be interviewed on Monday at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch in Farnborough, Hampshire.

Malcolm Fowler, another engineer who carried out safety tests on the aircraft, will also be interviewed. Mr Fowler has since left Helios.

Akrivos Tsolakis, the head of the Greek air safety board, who is flying to London on Sunday with colleagues, said he believed that the engineers had important information that could help to explain the mystery of the crash.

He told The Times: “Mr Irwin didn’t want to fly to Cyprus so we are coming to London as he could be very enlightening in certain aspects. We don’t care if we have to go to Antarctica, we just want to do our job.”

Mr Irwin has already given a statement to Cypriot police that contradicts claims by Helios that there had been no fault with the aircraft on its penultimate flight.

A Helios spokeswoman initially said that there was “nothing to bat an eyelid at”, despite British holidaymakers reporting that it was unusually cold. The company later withdrew that statement and refused to comment.

Mr Irwin said that he and Mr Fowler had inspected the aircraft after it landed because the crew had reported noise coming from the rear door. Mr Fowler stood on a catering lorry to check the door.

A leak in the rear door had forced the same aircraft to make an emergency landing last December.

Captain Tsolakis is investigating claims that some Helios engineers had raised concerns about the aircraft’s fitness to fly. He is also keen to question Mr Irwin about his radio conversation with the pilot. Mr Irwin told police that the conversation was “confused” and the pilot was difficult to understand.

Captain Tsolakis said that the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder had been recovered from the wreckage. He said that his report would be issued in “six months plus”.

Times Recommends

• 'Devastating' abuse found amongst Aborigines
• LA profits from Michael Jackson stimulus
• Was Jörg Haider murdered?