bizarre circumstances - catastrophic for the families involved.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/world/europe/germanwings-crash.html

PARIS — A German jetliner on a routine flight to Düsseldorf from Barcelona, Spain, rapidly lost altitude for more than eight minutes and then crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday morning with 144 passengers and six crew members aboard, the airline said.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France said that no one on the plane had survived the crash.

The crash site is in a rugged part of the Alpes de Haute-Provence region of southeastern France that President François Hollande said at a news conference was very difficult to reach on the ground. The French Interior Ministry said that more than 400 police officers and rescue personnel had been sent to the area.

“As it is often the case in mountainous regions, the crash took place in a remote area unreachable by land” said Benoît Zeisser, a police captain in Digne, about 16 miles southwest of the crash site. “But we managed to quickly access the crash zone by helicopter this morning.”

Two officers from the specialized mountain police force and a doctor “all dropped onto the crash scene with cables shortly after 11 a.m.,” Captain Zeisser said. “The gendarmes were able to confirm that a crash had occurred at this particular location and that the plane was completely smashed.”

The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who flew over the crash scene on Tuesday, called the scene “a picture of horror.”

In the early evening, the French interior minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, reported that the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, one of the plane’s two “black boxes,” had been found. The device records up to two hours of the pilots’ conversations as well as other cockpit sounds, including any alarms that may have gone off during the flight.

A French official with direct knowledge of the investigation said searchers were still looking for the other black box, the flight data recorder, which keeps track of roughly 1,300 different statistics about the aircraft’s operational performance.

The aircraft, an Airbus A320, operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, took off from Barcelona at 10:01 a.m. The jet, Flight 9525, climbed normally to its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet but remained there for only a few minutes before beginning to descend at a high rate, the managing director of Germanwings, Thomas Winkelmann, told reporters.

When French air traffic controllers lost contact with the aircraft at about 10:53, it was flying at just 6,000 feet, Mr. Winkelmann said, and it crashed shortly afterward. Witnesses in the area of the crash site said that the terrain there rose to an elevation of more than 6,000 feet.

The wreckage was located by a French military helicopter near the town of Prads-Haute-Bléone, according to Eric Héraud, a spokesman in Paris for the aviation authority, the Direction Générale de l’Aviation Civile.

Aviation safety experts said that a steady descent of more than eight minutes, while highly unusual, may not be consistent with a sudden midair upset, such as an aerodynamic stall. In such cases, they said, they would expect a plane to fall from cruising altitude to the ground in half that time or less.

“While investigators still need to verify the data are correct, eight minutes is definitely longer, compared with the experience we have had in past cases,” said Olivier Ferrante, a former crash investigator for the French government who now advises the European Commission in Brussels. He cited the Air France flight that crashed over the Atlantic Ocean in 2009, which fell to sea level from 38,000 feet in three and a half minutes.

The early images of wreckage, showing debris in small pieces strewn over a rugged mountainside, suggested that the plane had probably struck the ground at very high speed, Mr. Ferrante said, but he cautioned that it was far too early to speculate about why.

Mr. Valls, the prime minister, told the French National Assembly on Tuesday that no hypothesis about the cause of the crash could yet be excluded, and that a judicial investigation had been opened. He said France would do everything possible to support the families of victims.

Frédéric Atger, a spokesman for Météo France, which monitors weather across the country, said that the conditions had been “particularly calm” in the area at the time of the crash.

“The visibility was good, and there were little clouds at low altitudes,” he said. “There were no convected clouds at the time of the crash, and the wind was light. There was no alarming weather. The flying conditions were usual.”

Temperatures below freezing were expected overnight, though, with a chance of snow, complicating search and recovery efforts, the French Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Mr. Hollande said that many of the people on board were German, and that none were believed to be French. King Felipe VI of Spain, who had just arrived in Paris for a state visit when the crash was reported, said that Spanish and Turkish citizens had also been on the flight, and Reuters reported that there was one Belgian.

“We must feel grief, because this is a tragedy that happened on our soil,” Mr. Hollande said. “I want to make sure that there have been no other consequences as the accident happened in a very difficult area to access, and I do not know yet if there were houses nearby. We will know in the next few hours. In the meantime, we must show support.”

Bruno Lambert, a mountain guide who lives in Chanolles, a hamlet in the Prads-Haute-Bléone municipality, said the area of the crash was sparsely populated with steep mountain terrain.

“The mountains are very hard to access — there is no road access, neither in the summer nor the winter,” he said. “The people around here live in very isolated hamlets, and at this time of year, there is almost no one.”

Sandrine Julien, an employee at the town hall in Seynes-les-Alpes, said that a command center had been set up in the town. Neither she nor her colleagues had seen or heard anything, she said, and as a result they had all been surprised when rescue operations started.

“There are four to five helicopters, and lots of police cars, firefighters and ambulances,” Ms. Julien said, adding that the crash site was at an elevation of more than 6,500 feet. “So the helicopters are doing most of the work at the moment.”

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Officials in Haltern am See, a small city near Dortmund in northwestern Germany, said that 16 10th-grade students and two teachers from a local high school, the Joseph-Königs Gymnasium, were aboard the plane. They were returning from an annual exchange with students from the Institut Giola in Llinars del Vallès, near Barcelona, the school wrote on its home page.

The French president, the German chancellor and the Spanish prime minister discussed the next steps their countries are taking after a Germanwings plane crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday. Publish Date March 24, 2015. Photo by Ian Langsdon/European Pressphoto Agency.
“This is the darkest day in the history of our city,” said Bodo Klimpel, the mayor.

He said the school closed and sent students home when the news of the crash was confirmed. He said the school would reopen on Wednesday, but instead of holding regular classes, students and teachers would gather in the auditorium to begin working through their grief.

“You can imagine that tomorrow will also be a difficult day,” Mr. Klimpel told reporters.

Hans-Josef Böing, an administrator for the city, said in a telephone interview that many parents had gone to the Düsseldorf airport to meet their children, and that psychiatrists were there to assist them.

Pere Grivé, an official in Llinars del Vallès, the Spanish town where the German students had stayed with local families, said that “everybody here is in complete shock.”

The type of aircraft that crashed, an Airbus A320 single-aisle jet, is a workhorse of many airline fleets, with more than 5,600 in service around the world. More than one billion passenger journeys were flown on jets in the A320 series — which includes a smaller version, the A319, and a stretched model, the A321 — in the last year, according to estimates by Ascend, a London-based aviation consultancy.

The safety record of the A320 series has been very good, but not completely spotless. Since entering into service in 1988, A320 aircraft have been involved in 12 fatal accidents, according to Ascend.

Heike Birlenbach, an executive from Lufthansa, told reporters at the Barcelona airport that the plane used for Flight 9525 dated from 1990 and had logged 58,000 hours of flight time. She said it was checked by technicians on Monday in Düsseldorf, without any problems.

Airbus said in a statement on Tuesday that “all efforts are now going towards assessing the situation” and that it would provde more information when it became available.

In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel called the crash a “terrible shock” and said: “I feel terribly sorry, because so many people died in this disaster. Our thoughts and prayers are with these people.” She said she would fly to southern France on Wednesday to meet with the authorities there.

Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain said he had spoken with Ms. Merkel and with the Spanish king, who cut short his Paris visit to return to Spain. “We are all deeply moved and will do everything we can to help the families of the victims,” Mr. Rajoy said.

Germanwings, based in Cologne, was founded in 2002 and acquired by Lufthansa in 2009. It has since grown to become Lufthansa’s main operator for domestic and short-haul European flights from cities other than the main hubs of Munich and Frankfurt. It has a fleet of around 81 planes, of which about two-thirds are Airbus A320s and A319s.

The crash was the first fatal accident involving the Lufthansa group of airlines — which also includes Austrian Airlines and Swiss — in more than two decades, and the deadliest since 1974, when a Lufthansa Boeing 747 crashed on takeoff in Nairobi, Kenya, killing 59 of the 157 passengers and crew onboard.

There had not been a major deadly crash of a jetliner on French soil since July 2000, when a Concorde crashed on takeoff in Paris, killing 113 people. >The Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009 killed 228 people. It had been flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.


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