Germanwings Flight 4U 9525, Lufthansa’s low-cost carrier, that had departed from Barcelona and was heading to Duesseldorf went down in the French Alps with 144 passengers and 6 crew on board. France Prime Minister Manuel Valls has confirmed that a helicopter has been sent to the scene, and there are no survivors.
According to a report from Bruce Robin, prosecutor for the city of Marseille, who was in the surveillance helicopter, not one piece of the Airbus plane is intact, and bodies are “in a state of destruction.”
It is believed that 67 Germans were onboard, and Spain’s deputy prime minister said 45 passengers had Spanish names; one Belgian was also onboard.
Among the dead are 16 school children and 2 teachers from the Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium high school in the town of Haltern am, Germany.
Because of the harsh terrain and snowy storms, it will take days to recover the bodies.
Germanwings stated that after the airplane reached cruising altitude, one minute later it lost altitude, sharply descending for 8 minutes to around 6,000 feet. At this point the aircraft disappeared off radar at 10:53 am, then crashed.
Airbus experts say that although the descent of the plane was sharp, it did not mean the aircraft had simply fallen out of the sky. There was no distress call made by the pilots.
Routine maintenance of the aircraft had been performed by Lufthansa on Monday. The airplane was 24 years old, and was delivered to Germanwings parent, Lufthansa, in 1991.
The airliner crashed in Meolans-Revel, a remote commune with few in habitants, not far from the border of Italy, about 65 miles north of the French Riviera city of Nice. French and German accident investigators are heading for the crash site.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel will travel there on Wednesday, and Germanwings and the Catalan regional government are preparing to transport Spanish relatives to the site. King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain called off their state visit to France as a sign of mourning for the victims.
The US White House stated that the crash does not appear to be a terror attack.
