150 dead in French Alps plane crash
A GERMANWINGS passenger jet carrying at least 150 people crashed yesterday in a snowy, remote section of the French Alps, sounding like an avalanche as it scattered pulverised debris across the area.
All aboard were were killed on impact, French officials said.
One of the plane’s black box recorders had been found and would be examined immediately, France’s interior minister said.
There was no obvious reason the Germanwings A320 plane should have crashed in the middle of its flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel urged people not to speculate on the cause. In Washington, the White House said US officials were in contact with French, Spanish and German counterparts.
It added the crash did not appear to have been caused by a terrorist attack.
The crash left officials and families across Europe in shock. Sobbing, grieving families at Barcelona and Duesseldorf airports were led away by airport workers and crisis counsellors.
“We still don’t know much beyond the bare information on the flight, and there should be no speculation on the cause of the crash,” Merkel told reporters at a briefing in Berlin. “All that will be investigated thoroughly.”
The plane left Barcelona at 9.55am. Germanwings official Thomas Winkelmann said it began descending again shortly after reaching its cruising height of 38 000 feet. The descent lasted eight minutes, he said. Radar and air traffic control contact broke off at 10.53am at about 6 000 feet.
The plane crashed in the French Alps at about 6 550 feet, said PierreHenry Brandet, the French Interior Ministry spokesman.
Winkelmann said the pilot had more than 10 years’ experience working for Germanwings and its parent airline, Lufthansa. Airbus said the A320 had been delivered to Lufthansa in 1991.
Germanwings said Flight 9525 carried 144 passengers, including two babies, and six crew members.
Officials believe there were 67 Germans on board.
The crash site was at Meolans-Revels, near the Pra Loup ski resort, said Eric Ciotti, head of the regional council in south-east France. It is 700km south-southeast of Paris. But with mountains all around and few clear trails into the area, access to the crash site was expected to take time.
Brandet told BFM television he expected “an extremely long and extremely difficult” search-and-rescue operation because of the area’s remoteness.
“It was deafening… I thought it was an avalanche, although it sounded slightly different. It was a short noise and lasted just a few seconds,” Sandrine Boisse, president of the Pra Loup tourism office, said.
Germanwings is a lower-cost unit of Lufthansa, Germany’s biggest airline, and serves mostly European destinations. It has been operating since 2002.
Relatives arriving at Duesseldorf airport were taken from the main terminal to a nearby building, which airport staff partially covered with sheets for privacy. At Barcelona airport, police escorted several crying women to a secure area.
The owner of a campground near the crash site, Pierre Polizzi, said he heard the plane making curious noises shortly before it crashed.
“At 11.30 I heard a series of loud noises. There are often fighter jets flying over, so I thought it sounded just like that… but I couldn’t see any fighter planes. The noise was long – like eight seconds – as if the plane was going more slowly than a military plane. There was another long noise after about 30 seconds.”
The plane had crashed 5 to 8km from the campground.
The municipal sports hall of Seyne-les-Alpes, 10km from the Val d’Allos ski resort, was being set up to take bodies from the crash, said Sandrine Julien of the town hall.
“The plane is disintegrated,” Gilbert Sauvan of the local council told the Les Echos newspaper. “The largest debris is the size of a car.”
German media reported that 16 high school students and two teachers from Haltern in western Germany were among the victims, but police and the school would not immediately confirm the report.
The last time a passenger jet crashed in France was the 2000 Concorde accident, which left 113 dead – 109 in the plane and four on the ground.