|
 Helicopters flew over the site where the A320 operated by
Lufthansa's <LHAG.DE> Germanwings budget airline disintegrated after
it went down in a remote area of ravines en route to Duesseldorf
from Barcelona. Police investigators made their way across the
mountains on foot.
No distress call was received before the plane crashed on Tuesday,
but French authorities said one of the two "black box" flight
recorders, the cockpit voice recorder, has been recovered from the
site 2,000 meters (6,000 feet) above sea level.
"The black box has been damaged. We will have to put it back
together in the next few hours to be able to get to the bottom of
this tragedy," French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told RTL
radio, adding the box was still viable.
Cazeneuve said the fact debris was scattered over a small area of
about one and a half hectares showed the plane likely did not
explode in the air, meaning a terrorist attack was not the most
likely scenario.
French Civil aviation investigators are expected to hold a news
conference on Wednesday afternoon.
 In Washington, the White House said the crash did not appear to have
been caused by a terrorist attack. Lufthansa said it was working on
the assumption that the tragedy had been an accident, and any other
theory would be speculation.
FLIGHTS CANCELED
Germanwings was cancelling some flights on Wednesday as some crew
members had refused to fly. "There are crew members who do not want
to fly in the current situation, which we understand," a spokeswoman
for Germanwings said.
"Seeing the site of the accident was harrowing," Lufthansa chief
executive Carsten Spohr said on Twitter. "We will enable the
relatives to grieve on site as soon as possible."
French President Francois Hollande will visit the area, about 100 km
(65 miles) north of Nice, on Wednesday with German Chancellor Angela
Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
Germanwings believed 67 Germans were on the flight and Spain said 45
passengers had Spanish names. One Belgian was aboard, Australia said
two of it nationals had died and Britain said it was likely some
Britons were on the plane.
Also among the victims were 16 teenagers and two teachers from the
Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium high school in the town of Haltern am See in
northwest Germany. They were on their way home after a week-long
Spanish exchange program near Barcelona.
The school held a day of mourning on Wednesday. Students arrived by
bicycle and on foot like any normal day, but stopped by candles and
flowers placed outside the school, where a hand-painted sign said:
"Yesterday we were many, today we are alone."
 Barcelona's Liceu opera house said two singers, Kazakhstan-born Oleg
Bryjak and German Maria Radner, had died while returning to
Duesseldorf after performing in Wagner's Siegfried at the theater.
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SMOLDERING WRECKAGE
Aerial photographs showed smoldering wreckage and a piece of the
fuselage with six windows strewn across the mountainside.
"We saw an aircraft that had literally been ripped apart, the bodies
are in a state of destruction, there is not one intact piece of wing
or fuselage," Brice Robin, prosecutor for the city of Marseille,
told Reuters after flying over the site.
Germanwings said on Tuesday the plane started descending one minute
after reaching cruising height and continued losing altitude for
eight minutes.
Experts said that while the Airbus had descended rapidly, it did not
seem to have simply fallen out of the sky.
A Lufthansa flight from Bilbao to Munich on Nov. 5 lost altitude
after sensors iced over and the onboard computer, fearing the plane
was about to stall, put the nose down. As a result, the European
Aviation Safety Agency ordered a change in procedure for all A320
jets.
Asked whether something similar could have occurred on Tuesday,
Germanwings Managing Director Thomas Winkelmann said, "At this time
this evening, we are ruling out a possible cause in this area."
The aircraft came down in a region known for skiing, hiking and
rafting, but which is difficult for rescue services to reach. The
base of operations for the recovery effort was set up in a gymnasium
in the village of Seyne-les-Alpes.
It was the first disaster involving a large passenger jet in France
since a Concorde crashed outside Paris nearly 15 years ago.
The A320 is one of the world’s most used passenger jets and has a
good safety record. According to data from the Aviation Safety
Network, Tuesday's crash was the third most deadly involving the
model. In 2007 a TAM Linhas Aereas A320 went off a runway in Brazil,
killing 187 people, and 162 people died when an Indonesia AirAsia
<AIRA.KL> jet went down in the Java Sea in December.
The Germanwings plane was 24 years old, with engines made by CFM
International, a joint venture between General Electric <GE.N> and
France's Safran <SAF.PA>.
(Additional reporting by Yann Le Guernigou, Maria Sheahan and Oliver
Barth; Writing by David Stamp and Ingrid Melander; editing by Mark
John and Giles Elgood)
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