150 dead in French Alps plane crash, investigators seach for answers
French investigators on Wednesday searched for the cause to the sudden German Airbus crash into an Alpine mountainside, killing all 150 on board including 16 teenagers returning from a school trip to Spain.
Helicopters flew over the site where the A320 operated by Lufthansa’s Germanwings airline “disintegrated” after it went down in a remote area of ravines en route to Duesseldorf from Barcelona. Police investigators made their way across the mountains on foot as the crash site proves to be increasingly challenging and offers no clues yet.
No distress call was received before the plane crashed on Tuesday, but French authorities said one of the two “black box” flight recorders, the cockpit voice recorder, has been recovered from the site.
“The black box has been damaged. We will have to put it back together in the next few hours to be able to get to the bottom of this tragedy,” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told RTL radio, adding the box was still viable.
Cazeneuve explained that the debris field indicates that there was no explosion in the air, ruling out foul play like a terrorist attack. This news comes ahead of the French Civil aviation investigators news conference set for later today.
“For the time being, we say it’s an accident, anything else would be speculation,” Lufthansa vice president Heike Birlenbach told reporters at Barcelona’s El Prat airport from where the plane took off.
Germanwings believed 67 Germans were on the flight and Spain said 45 passengers had Spanish names. One Belgian was aboard, Australia said two of it nationals had died and Britain said it was likely some Britons were on the plane.
16 teenagers and two teachers from the Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium high school in the town of Haltern am See in northwest Germany were killed in the crash. They were on their way home after a week-long Spanish exchange programme near Barcelona.
