Jet Crash in French Alps Kills 150; Cockpit Voice Recorder is Found

Digne-les-Bains, France:

A German jetliner en route from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany, plunged from the sky on Tuesday and slammed into the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board.

Helicopters and rescue personnel swarmed into the remote, rugged area in southeastern France after the crash but found no signs of life. Prime Minister Manuel Valls said none of the 144 passengers and six crew members survived.

The authorities and executives of the airline, the budget carrier Germanwings, a subsidiary of Lufthansa, had no immediate explanation for the cause of the crash, which occurred just before 11 a.m. At a news conference Tuesday evening, Heike Birlenbach, the vice president of Lufthansa, said "At this stage, we consider this to be an accident," adding that everything else was speculation.

As night fell in the area, officials said they had recovered one of the jet's so-called black boxes: the cockpit voice recorder, which captures up to two hours of the pilots' conversations as well as other cockpit noises, including any alarms that would have sounded as the plane descended. A few hours later, they called off the search for the evening.

The plane, an Airbus A320 that carried young people, vacationers and others, crashed after an eight-minute descent from 38,000 feet, the managing director of Germanwings, Thomas Winkelmann, said at a news conference.

When French air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane at 10:53 a.m., it was flying at just 6,000 feet, Winkelmann said, and it crashed shortly afterward. The terrain in that area rises to an elevation of more than 6,000 feet.

Security personnel in Digne-les-Bains, a town close to the crash site, described a scene of almost unimaginable wreckage, with even the plane's metal structures smashed into countless pieces.

"The airplane had completely disintegrated," Capt. Benoit Zeisser, head of the center of operations and information for the local police in Digne-les-Bains, said late Tuesday. "There is nothing left; the area of the crash is huge."

As emergency crews combed France's Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department, Valls announced a judicial investigation into the crash. Many questions remained, including whether the pilots were in control of the aircraft during the descent and what would have caused a plane with an experienced pilot and solid safety record to crash in largely clear and cloudless weather.

The passengers included Germans, Spaniards, Turks and Australians, and among them was a class of 16 German high school students and two teachers who were returning from a study program near Barcelona. Some of their parents gathered at the airport in Dusseldorf, frantically waiting for news.

"This is the darkest day in the history of our city," said Bodo Klimpel, the mayor of Haltern am See, in northwestern Germany, where the 10th-grade students went to school. "It is about the worst thing imaginable."

As he spoke, people began arriving outside the Joseph Konig high school in the small city, bearing flowers and candles.

According to Germanwings, at least 67 Germans were among the passengers, which included two infants. The airline was working to inform families before releasing further information about those on board.

But Barcelona's Liceu opera house said late Tuesday that two singers who had been performing in Wagner's "Siegfried" were on board: the baritone Oleg Bryjak and the contralto Maria Radner. Radner was traveling with her husband and baby, said Joan Corbera, a Liceu spokesman.

Two employees of Delphi, a U.S. automotive company, and at least one employee of Bayer, a German chemical company, were also among the passengers, according to Spanish media reports. Two Australians, a mother and adult son from Victoria, died in the crash, said Australia's foreign minister, Julie Bishop.

At El Prat Airport outside Barcelona, dozens of relatives were kept in a waiting area, attended to by psychologists and protected by the police.

The aircraft took off at 10:01 a.m. No distress call was received, and the pilots lost radio contact with their control center, said France's aviation authority.

Evelyne Bayle, who lives in Le Vernet, France, said she heard the engines, but the sounds did not suggest that the plane had gone into free fall. "I was on my veranda and I heard the plane flying down; the engines were making a lot of noise," she said. "The noise that we were hearing was really progressive."

The leaders of France, Spain and Germany made public addresses to offer comfort and reassurances that the crash would be thoroughly investigated. The National Assembly in France observed a minute of silence.

President Francois Hollande of France, standing with King Felipe VI of Spain, who was in Paris for a state visit, warned that access to the crash site would be very difficult. The Interior Ministry in France said that more than 400 police officers and rescue personnel had been sent to the area. Hollande said that none of the people on board were believed to be French.

"We must feel grief because this is a tragedy that happened on our soil," Hollande said.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany, who was flown over the crash scene on Tuesday, said the site was "a picture of horror."