Germanwings Airbus Carrying 150 Crashes in French Alps

A German jetliner on a routine flight to Dusseldorf from Barcelona, Spain, rapidly lost altitude for more than eight minutes and then crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday morning with 144 passengers and six crew members onboard, the airline said.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France said that no one on the plane had survived the crash.

Search and rescue teams scrambled in the afternoon to get to the site, in a remote and rugged part of the Alpes de Haute-Provence region of southeastern France that President Francois Hollande said at a news conference would be very difficult to reach. The French Interior Ministry said that more than 400 police officers and rescue personnel had been dispatched to the area.

In the early evening, the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve,reported that the plane's cockpit voice recorder, one of the plane's two "black boxes," had been found.

The aircraft, an Airbus A320, operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, took off at 10:01 a.m. It climbed normally to its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet but remained there for only a few minutes before beginning to descend at a high rate, the managing director of Germanwings, Thomas Winkelmann, told reporters.

When French air traffic controllers lost contact with the aircraft at 10:53, it was flying at just 6,000 feet, Winkelmann said, and it crashed shortly afterward. Witnesses in the area of the crash site said that the terrain there rose to an elevation of more than 6,000 feet.

Wreckage was located by a French military helicopter near the town of Prads-Haute-Bléone, according to Eric Heraud, a spokesman in Paris for the aviation authority, the Direction Geenerale de l'Aviation Civile.

Aviation safety experts said that a steady descent of more than eight minutes, while highly unusual, may not be consistent with a sudden mid-air upset, such as an aerodynamic stall. In such cases, they said, they would expect a plane to fall from cruising altitude to the ground in half that time or less.

"While investigators still need to verify the data are correct, eight minutes is definitely longer, compared with the experience we have had in past cases," said Olivier Ferrante, a former crash investigator for the French government who now advises the European Commission in Brussels. He cited the Air France flight that crashed over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, which fell to sea level from 38,000 feet in 3 1/2 minutes.

The early images of wreckage, showing debris in small pieces, suggested the plane had probably struck the ground at very high speed, Ferrante said, but he cautioned that it was far too early to speculate why.

Valls, the prime minister, told the French National Assembly on Tuesday that no hypothesis about the cause of the crash could yet be excluded, and that a judicial investigation had been opened. He expressed his solidarity with the families of the victims and said that France would do everything possible to support them.

Frédéric Atger, a spokesman for Météo France, which monitors weather across the country, said that the conditions had been "particularly calm" in the area at the time of the crash.

"The visibility was good, and there were little clouds at low altitudes," he said. "There were no convected clouds at the time of the crash, and the wind was light. There was no alarming weather. The flying conditions were usual."

Conditions were expected to worsen later in the afternoon and evening, however, with temperatures below freezing overnight, complicating search efforts, the French Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Hollande said that many of the people on board were German, and that none were believed to be French. King Felipe VI of Spain, who had just arrived in Paris for a state visit when the crash was reported, said that Spanish and Turkish citizens had also been on the flight, and Reuters reported that there was one Belgian.

"We must feel grief, because this is a tragedy that happened on our soil," Hollande said. "I want to make sure that there have been no other consequences as the accident happened in a very difficult area to access, and I do not know yet if there were houses nearby. We will know in the next few hours. In the meantime, we must show support."

Bruno Lambert, a mountain guide who lives in Chanolles, a hamlet in the Prads-Haute-Bléone municipality, said the area of the crash was sparsely populated with steep mountain terrain.

"The mountains are very hard to access - there is no road access, neither in the summer nor the winter," he said. "The people around here live in very isolated hamlets, and at this time of year, there is almost no one."

A local official in the region, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly, said that an initial survey of the area by a helicopter showed that debris had been spread across a very craggy area. A local newspaper posted photos online that it said showed wreckage from the crash.

Sandrine Julien, an employee at the town hall in Seynes-les-Alpes, said that a command center had been set up in the town. Neither she nor her colleagues had seen or heard anything, she said, and as a result they had all been surprised when rescue operations started.

"There are four to five helicopters, and lots of police cars, firefighters and ambulances," Julien said, adding that the crash site was at an elevation of more than 6,500 feet. "So the helicopters are doing most of the work at the moment."

Officials in Haltern am See, a small city near Dortmund in northwestern Germany, said that 16 10th-grade students and two teachers from a local high school, the Joseph-Konigs Gymnasium, were aboard the plane. They were returning from an annual exchange with students from the Institut Giola in Llinars del Valles, near Barcelona, the school wrote on its homepage.

"This is the darkest day in the history of our city," said Bodo Klimpel, the mayor.

He said the school closed and sent students home when the news of the crash was confirmed. He said the school would reopen Wednesday, but instead of holding regular classes, students and teachers would gather in the auditorium to begin working through their grief.

"You can imagine that tomorrow will also be a difficult day," Klimpel told reporters.

Hans-Josef Boing, an administrator for the city, said in a telephone interview that many parents had gone to the Dusseldorf airport to meet their children, and that psychiatrists were there to assist them. The type of aircraft that crashed, an Airbus A320 single-aisle jet, is a workhorse of many airline fleets, with more than 5,600 in service around the world. More than one billion passenger trips were flown on jets in the A320 series - which includes a smaller version, the A319, and a stretched model, the A321 - according to estimates by Ascend, a London-based aviation consultancy.

The aircraft's safety record has been very good, but not completely spotless. Since entering into service in 1988, A320 aircraft have been involved in 12 fatal accidents, according to Ascend.

"We are aware of the media reports and all efforts are now going towards assessing the situation," Airbus said in a statement Tuesday. "We will provide further information as soon as available."

In Germany, Merkel expressed her deep sympathy for the families of the victims, saying that the crash was a "terrible shock" and that there would be thorough investigation.

"I feel terribly sorry, because so many people died in this disaster," she said. "Our thoughts and prayers are with these people."

Merkel said she would fly to southern France on Wednesday to meet with the authorities there.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain said he had spoken with Merkel and with the Spanish king, who cut short his visit to Paris to return to Madrid. "We are all deeply moved and will do everything we can to help the families of the victims," Rajoy said.

Germanwings, based in Cologne, was founded in 2002 and acquired by Lufthansa in 2009. It has since grown to become Lufthansa's main operator for domestic and short-haul European flights from cities other than the main hubs of Munich and Frankfurt. It has a fleet of around 81 planes, of which about two-thirds are Airbus A320s and A319s.

French news reports said that the crash Tuesday ranks as the third deadliest in the country's history. In December 1981, a chartered Yugoslav DC-9 jetliner smashed into a mountain in Corsica minutes before it was due to land at Ajaccio Airport, killing all 180 people on board. In 1974, a Turkish Airlines DC-10 crashed outside Paris, killing more than 335 people.