German Airbus crashes in French Alps with 150 dead including 16 school kids, black box found

Wednesday, 25 March 2015 00:55 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Reuters: An Airbus operated by Lufthansa’s Germanwings budget airline crashed in a remote area of the French Alps on Tuesday, killing all 150 people on board including 16 schoolchildren. Germanwings confirmed its flight 4U 9525 from Barcelona to Duesseldorf went down with 144 passengers and six crew on board. One of the plane’s black box recorders has been found and will be examined immediately, France’s interior minister said. In Washington, the White House said the crash did not appear to have been caused by a terrorist attack. The airline believed there were 67 Germans on the flight. Spain’s deputy prime minister said 45 passengers had Spanish names. One Belgian was aboard. Also among the victims were 16 children and two teachers from the Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium high school in the town of Haltern am See in northwest Germany, a spokeswoman said. Investigators described a scene of devastation where the airliner crashed. Aerial photographs showed smouldering wreckage and a piece of the fuselage with six windows. “We saw an aircraft that had literally been ripped apart, the bodies are in a state of destruction, there is not one intact piece of wing or fuselage,” Bruce Robin, prosecutor for the city of Marseille, told Reuters in Seyne-les-Alpes after flying over the crash zone in a helicopter. French police at the crash site said no one survived and it would take days to recover the bodies due to difficult terrain, snow and incoming storms. Police said search teams would stay overnight at altitude. “We are still searching. It’s unlikely any bodies will be airlifted until Wednesday,” regional police chief David Galtier told Reuters. In Paris, Prime Minister Manuel Valls told parliament: “A helicopter managed to land (by the crash site) and has confirmed that unfortunately there were no survivors.” It was the first crash of a large passenger jet on French soil since the Concorde disaster just outside Paris nearly 15 years ago. The A320 is a workhorse of worldwide aviation fleets. They are the world’s most used passenger jets and have a good though not unblemished safety record. Germanwings said the plane started descending one minute after reaching its cruising height and continued losing altitude for eight minutes. “The aircraft’s contact with French radar, French air traffic controllers, ended at 10.53 a.m. at an altitude of about 6,000 feet. The plane then crashed,” Germanwings’ Managing Director Thomas Winkelmann told a news conference. Winkelmann also said that routine maintenance of the aircraft was performed by Lufthansa on Monday. Experts said that while the Airbus had descended rapidly, its rate of descent did not suggest it had simply fallen out of the sky. France’s DGAC aviation authority said air traffic controllers initiated distress procedures after they lost contact with the Airbus, which did not issue a distress call. “The aircraft did not itself make a distress call but it was the combination of the loss of radio contact and the aircraft’s descent which led the controller to implement the distress phase,” a DGAC spokesman said. The aircraft came down in an alpine region known for skiing, hiking and rafting, but which is hard for rescue services to reach.