SEYNE, France // All 150 people on board a German passenger jet were killed on Tuesday when it crashed in a remote area of the French Alps after plunging for eight minutes.
Officials said the Germanwings Airbus A320 had made no distress call before going down in an inaccessible mountain area near the ski resort of Barcelonnette. It was France’s worst aviation disaster in decades.
With the cause of the accident a complete mystery, authorities recovered a black box from the plane at the crash site, where rescue efforts were being hampered by the mountainous terrain.
Local MP Christophe Castaner, who flew over the area, said on Twitter: “Horrendous images in this mountain scenery.”
“Nothing is left but debris and bodies. Flying over the crash site with the interior minister – a horror – the plane is totally destroyed.”
Video images from a government helicopter flying near the area in a mountain range known as “Les Trois Eveches” showed a desolate snow-flecked moonscape, with steep ravines covered in scree.
The plane, carrying 144 mainly Spanish and German passengers – including two babies – and six crew, was travelling from Barcelona to the western German city of Düsseldorf when it came down.
Authorities in Berlin said 16 German teenagers on a school trip were on board the doomed plane, as tearful relatives rushed to the airports in the two cities anxiously seeking information about their loved ones.
Both the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, said they would visit the crash site on Wednesday.
Ms Merkel described the news as “a shock which has plunged us into deep mourning in Germany, France and Spain”.
Weather did not appear to be a contributing factor in the crash, with France’s meteorologists saying conditions were “calm” at the time.
“There was no cloud at the plane’s cruising altitude”, winds were “light to moderate” and there was no turbulence that could have contributed to the crash, the meteorologists said.
It was the first fatal accident in the history of Germanwings – the budget carrier of Germany’s Lufthansa airline – and the deadliest on the French mainland since 1974 when a Turkish Airlines plane crashed, killing 346 people.
Heike Birlenbach, a Lufthansa vice president, said the company was treating the crash as an accident for “the time being.”
For now “we say it is an accident. There is nothing more we can say right now”, she said, adding that the plane took off from Barcelona 30 minutes late on Tuesday but that she did not know what caused the delay.
The jet was inspected by Lufthansa’s technical team on Monday.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Airbus, the European aerospace giant, did not give any information about possible causes but said the company had opened a “crisis cell”.
French president Francois Hollande said the dead included Germans, Spaniards and “probably” Turks, while Belgium said at least one of its nationals was on board.
Germanwings said 67 Germans were believed to have been on board while Spain said 45 people with Spanish sounding names were on the flight.
A crisis cell has been set up in the area between Barcelonnette and Digne-les-Bains along with an emergency flight control centre to coordinate the operation to the crash site.
Authorities commandeered a large meadow with dozens of helicopters taking off to head to the crash site.
French prime minister Valls said one helicopter had been able to touch down at the site of the accident but locals described the difficult terrain that threatened to hamper rescue efforts.
“Ground access is horrible, I know the Estrop massif, it’s a very high mountainous area, very steep and it’s terrible to get there except from the air during winter,” local resident Francoise Pie said.
A witness who was skiing near the crash site told French television he “heard an enormous noise” around the time of the disaster.
French civil aviation authorities said they lost contact with the plane and declared it was in distress at 10.30am local time.
However, the aircraft’s crew did not send a distress signal, civil aviation authorities said.
“The crew did not send a Mayday. It was air traffic control that decided to declare the plane was in distress because there was no contact with the crew of the plane,” they said.
In 1981, a plane crashed on the French island of Corsica with 180 people on board.
In July 2000, an Air France Concorde crashed shortly after take-off from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport en route for New York, leaving 113 people – mainly Germans – dead and eventually leading to the supersonic airliner being taken out of service.
* Agence France-Presse with additional reporting by Associated Press
