An aircraft with 150 people aboard has crashed in South France. Flight 4U 9525 left Barcelona approximately 10:00 a.m. local time on its way to Düsseldorf, Germany. None are believed to have survived.
The Germanwings budget airline’s Airbus A320 has been recovered for data retrieval. The plane reportedly dropped into a fast decline and air traffic control lost radar contact approximately one hour after its 10:00 a.m. departure from Spain.
Germanwings said it was only one minute after attaining cruising altitude that the craft began losing altitude. An eight-minute descent continued until the moment of the crash.
The French Interior Minister, Bernard Cazeneuve, said that the “violence” of the impact left little hope for survivors. Indeed, according to Prime Minister Manuel Valls, the crew of a helicopter was able to reach the crash site and confirmed that no one survived. The location of the crash was a remote area in the French Alps, Méolans-Reve, approximately 65 miles north of Nice.
Germanwings said the flight was transporting 144 passengers, four flight attendants and two pilots. Believed to be included were 67 Germans, 40 Spaniards, one Dutch national and one Belgian. The passenger manifest also shows two babies on board.
Gilbert Sauvan of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence general council, described the aircraft as “pulverized” and that access to the site from the ground is impossible. At the scene, however was Christophe Castaner, the mayor of Folcalquier, who tweeted that only debris and corpses were left.
Emergency crews from the town of Barcelonette have been mobilized for a search, but which could be deterred by low clouds and local storms. Weather does not appear to have been a factor in the crash and word from the White House says it does not believe the crash to have been terror-related.
Germanwings is wholly owned by Lufthansa. The captain of the A320, which was manufactured in 1991, had worked for Lufthansa for 10 years.
More than 6,000 A320’s are in operation around the world. In December, 162 people were killed when an A320 operated by Indonesia AirAsia crashed into the Java Sea.
