An Airbus A320 operated by the Germanwings airline, a budget
subsidiary of German carrier Lufthansa, crashed Tuesday in the French
Alps, apparently killing all 150 people on board, including 16 high
school students from Germany.
The Associated Press cited regional
official Eric Ciotti as saying wreckage from the plane had been
discovered at Meolans-Revels, near a popular ski resort between the
towns of Digne-les-Bains and Barcelonnette. The wreckage was believed
to be on the side of a mountain, inaccessible by roads and covered in
heavy snow.
Germanwings said the plane, which had been en route from Barcelona,
Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany, was carrying 144 passengers, two pilots
and four crew members. An airline executive said two babies were
believed to have been aboard the flight and Daily Style Entertainment Confirms with a school administrator that 16 students and two teachers
from Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium High School from the German town of
Haltern were on the plane.
"This is, of course, the worst thing you could imagine," Haltern Mayor Bodo Klimpel said.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that a helicopter landed near
the area where the plane went down, but the crew found no survivors.
"It is going to take days to recover the victims, then the debris," senior police officer Jean-Paul Bloy told Reuters.
Gilbert
Sauvan, president of the general council of the
Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, told the Associate Press that "everything is
pulverized" at the site of the crash.
The airline's managing
director Oliver Wagner said Germanwings would do everything possible to
determine what brought Flight 9525 down, but that he had no information
on what might have caused the crash as of Tuesday afternoon.
"Our deep sympathy goes out to the relatives and friends of the victims," Wagner said.
French President Francois Hollande said search and rescue teams did not expect to find any survivors from the crash.
"It's
a tragedy on our soil," the French leader said. He spoke on the phone
later Tuesday to his German counterpart Angela Merkel, as he expected
many of the victims of the crash were German.
Speaking in Germany, Merkel said she would fly herself to the crash site on Wednesday "to talk with local authorities."
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