As emergency workers suspended recovery operations for the night, there was still little clue as to what caused the crash of a Germanwings Airbus A320 in a remote area of the French Alps on Tuesday, killing all 150 on board, reports FRANCE 24.
A black box has been recovered from the crash site, where rescue efforts have been hampered by the mountainous terrain. Local MP Christophe Castaner, meanwhile, described the crash site as "horrendous” and said that “nothing is left but debris and bodies”.
Germanwings flight 4U9525 took off from Barcelona’s at 9:55am local time (8:55 GMT) en route to Dusseldorf in western Germany with a flight time of around two hours and ten minutes. Initial reports said a distress signal was sent by the crew, though this was later retracted, with aviation officials saying no such signal was sent.
Germanwings, a budget airline owned by owned by Lufthansa, said the plane went into a long descent for a total of eight minutes shortly after reaching its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. Radar and air traffic control contact broke off at 10:53am (9:53 GMT).
“The aircraft’s contact with French radar, French air traffic controllers ended at 10.53am at an altitude of about 6,000 feet. The plane then crashed,” Germanwings’ managing director Thomas Winkelmann told journalists at a news conference.
The final crash site is at Meolans-Revels, near the popular ski resort of Pra Loup, according to Eric Ciotti, the head of the regional council in southeast France. The crash site has an altitude of about 2,000 metres (6,550 feet).
There were a total of 150 people on board flight 4U9525: 144 passengers and six crew members. The nationalities of those on board are not yet known, but a Spanish government spokesperson said that 45 passengers had Spanish names, while Germanwings said it believed there were 67 German nationals on board. The passenger manifest included two babies, the airline said.
A group of German high school students returning from an exchange in Spain was also on board the flight, a German official said.
The 16 students along with two teachers from the town of Haltern am See had been visiting a school about 45 minutes from Barcelona.
“We know that the school group boarded the plane,” North Rhine-Westphalia state Education Minister Sylvia Loerhmann told the dpa news agency.
French President François Hollande said many of the victims were German but were also likely to include Spanish and Turkish nationals. He added that he believed that there were no French passengers on board.