France’s aviation investigation bureau has released photos of the badly mangled voice data recorder from the Germanwings flight that crashed into an Alpine mountainside.
The images show the metal black box which is actually a bright orange-red twisted, dented and scarred by the impact of the crash.
The cockpit voice recorder was recovered on Tuesday and French officials say they are working to pull its data.
Investigators searched for the reason why the German Airbus ploughed into an Alpine mountainside, killing all 150 on board including 16 teenagers returning from a school trip to Spain.
Helicopters flew over the site where the A320 operated by Lufthansa's Germanwings budget airline disintegrated after it went down in a remote area of ravines en route to Dusseldorf 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 2,000m 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.
Mr. 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 cancelled
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 north of Nice, on Wednesday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
Germanwings’ chief executive said the airline’s current information is that 72 Germans, 35 Spanish citizens and two Americans were on board the flight that crashed in southern France.
Thomas Winkelmann told reporters in Cologne on Wednesday that the list isn’t yet final because the company is still trying to contact relatives of 27 victims.
Mr. Winkelmann said in some cases victims’ nationality isn’t entirely clear, in part because of dual citizenship.
There were two victims each from Australia, Argentina, Iran and Venezuela. One victim each came from the Netherlands, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Denmark, Belgium and Israel.
Spain’s government said they had identified 49 Spanish victims, while Britain says it believes there were at least three Britons on board.
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 programme 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 theatre.
Smouldering wreckage
Aerial photographs showed smouldering 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 November 5, 2014 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, Mr. 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.
Earlier in the day, a cockpit voice recorder badly damaged when the German jetliner slammed into an Alpine mountainside and a crucial two-minute span when the pilot lost contact offer vital clues into the crash’s cause, officials said on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, the cockpit voice recorder was retrieved from the site, Mr. Cazeneuve said.
“The black box is damaged and must be reconstituted in the coming hours in order to be useable,” Mr. Cazeneuve told RTL radio.
Key to the investigation is what happened during the minutes 10.30 and 10.31 a.m., said Segolene Royal, a top government Minister whose portfolio includes transport. From then, controllers were unable to make contact with the plane.
The voice recorder takes audio feeds from four microphones within the cockpit and records all the conversations between the pilots, air traffic controllers as well as any noises heard in the cockpit. The flight data recorder, which Mr. Cazeneuve said had not been retrieved yet, captures 25 hours’ worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane.
Ms. Royal and Mr. Cazeneuve both emphasised that terrorism is considered unlikely.
Investigators retrieving data from the recorder will focus first “on the human voices, the conversations” followed by the cockpit sounds, Transport Secretary Alain Vidalies told Europe 1 radio. He said the government planned to release information gleaned from the black box as soon as it can be verified.
Victims included two babies, two opera singers, an Australian mother and her adult son vacationing together, and 16 German high school students and their teachers returning from an exchange trip to Spain.
In Seyne-les-Alpes, locals had offered to host bereaved families because of a shortage of rooms to rent, said the town’s Mayor, Francis Hermitte.
The plane, operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, was less than an hour from landing in Duesseldorf on a flight from Barcelona when it unexpectedly went into a rapid eight-minute descent. The pilots sent out no distress call and had lost radio contact with their control center, France’s aviation authority said.
Germanwings said 144 passengers and six crew members were on board.
An Air France flight from Paris to Saigon crashed just a few kilometres from the same spot in 1953, killing all 42 people on board.
Nationalities of those on the crashed jet
As of Wednesday, Germanwings had not issued a complete list of the nationalities of the 150 people aboard the plane that crashed in France on Tuesday.
67 Germans, confirmed by Germanwings.
Many Spaniards. The government says the passenger list included 45 people with Spanish last names but that it is still trying to confirm how many are Spanish citizens.
3 Kazakhs, confirmed by the government
3 British, confirmed by the government, which says it cannot rule out that there may be more.
2 Japanese, confirmed by the government
2 Colombians, confirmed by the government.
2 Australians, confirmed by the government
1 Dutch, confirmed by the government.
1 Dane, confirmed by the government.
1 Turk, confirmed by the government.
1 Israeli, confirmed by the government.
1 Mexican was probably aboard but the government says it is still trying to confirm the information.
Dusseldorf
Barcelona
