Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Germanwings Plane Black Box Damaged, Official Says - ABC News




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At least one American citizen was on board the Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps Tuesday, according to the French prime minister and the Germanwings CEO.


The United States State Department has not confirmed that an American was on the plane.


The Germanwings plane crashed Tuesday in the Alps in southern France with 150 people on board, including two babies, the airline said. French President Francois Hollande said there were "apparently no survivors."


Searchers returned to the crash scene today, as France's minister of the interior said a black box voice recorder has been recovered, but has damage. Despite the damage, said the official, Bernard Cazeneuve, the information on the recorder should still be retrievable.


The CEO of Lufthansa said a full analysis of the voice recorder was expected to be done by Thursday. But Brice Robin, public prosecutor of Marseille, said on BFM TV that black box results could take several days.


The initial focus for the voice recorder investigators will be "on the human voices, the conversations," followed by the cockpit sounds, France's transport minister, Alain Vidalies, told Europe 1 radio this morning.


The flight data recorder has not been retrieved yet.



PHOTO: This aerial photo show what appears to be wreckage from the Airbus A320 plane crash near the town of Digne in the French Alps, March 24, 2015.

MaxPPP/Newscom



PHOTO: This aerial photo show what appears to be wreckage from the Airbus A320 plane crash near the town of Digne in the French Alps, March 24, 2015.



Police helicopter searches of the Germanwings Airbus crash site resumed Wednesday morning.


Xavier Roy, coordinator for French air rescue, told ABC News that no bodies are going to be found today, and that the investigation on site will take a week. Unlike other crash sites, Roy said, there isn't much to find.


"When you go to a crash site you expect to recognize parts of an airplane." he said. "Sadly, here you don't see anything -- just debris scattered all over."


He added that this was a difficult area to search, as it is "nearly impossible to reach by foot," making it challenging to get rescuers in and out of the area safely.




The top priorities now are locating bodies and the second black box, he said.


Spanish King Felipe IV, who was in France for a pre-scheduled meeting with Hollande, said the passengers were German, Spanish and Turkish.


Germanwings said 67 Germans were on board.


The plane also had Kazakh, British, Japanese, Colombian, Australian, Dutch, Danish, Turkish and Israeli occupants, as confirmed by their governments.


"We are working on identifying the different nationalities." the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said on French TV. "There is an American, a Moroccan, British, Argentine, but again it is Lufthansa, German and Spanish authorities who should provide, as soon as possible, the overall data.”


The airline and the State Department have yet to confirm there was an American on board.


King Felipe had planned to stay in France for three days but now said he is returning to Madrid to launch a crisis center.


Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy were scheduled to arrive at the crash staging area today.


The cause of the crash has not yet been determined, the Germanwings CEO said. Lufthansa, which owns Germanwings, called the crash "an accident."


"Seeing the site of the accident was harrowing," Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr tweeted this morning. "We are in deep mourning. Our thoughts are with the relatives of the victims."


ABC News' Emily Shapiro contributed to this report.


Get real-time updates as this story unfolds. To start, just "star" this story in ABC News' phone app. Download ABC News for iPhone here or ABC News for Android here.


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