Helios Crash

A strange one this, certainly appears to be a hypoxia incident but it is difficult to understand why the pilots didn't simply reduce altitude to a breathable level. However hypoxia can come on very slowly and the results are similar to getting drunk, by the time you realise you are affected you are too drunk to care, very dangerous and has killed many times before notably the case of Payne Stuart in 1999.
The worry in this case is if the flight ran into problems more than 45 minutes before crashing the voice tapes in the black box will probably have looped so we may not know what happened when it actually started to go wrong.
The later 737s have a great safety record but the type of hard life a lot of these budget airlines put their planes and people through can cause worry, there is a report the pilot was complaining about air-pack (pressure and cabin conditioning units) issues at Larnaca but appears to have taken off with the fault unresolved, as of course he is entitled to do since there will be a second pack, that does limit the altitude to 25k feet though and I wonder if this was exceeded. Good 737 tech site here . Altitude warnings come on at 10,000 feet allowing plenty of time to reduce altitude unless this had been shut off, we will need to wait for the accident investigation board to get the final answer.
The only consolation may be that most people would have been unconscious at the time of the actual crash.
RIP
DW