French emergency services resumed work on Wednesday near the crash site of a Germanwings jet. Credit Alberto Estevez/European Pressphoto Agency
What We Know
• The pilots did not issue a distress call or initiate any communication with air traffic controllers as the plane began its eight-minute descent.
• The plane’s cockpit voice recorder was damaged, but officials are confident that its contents can be successfully examined.
• The aircraft, an Airbus A320, was 24 years old but had no history of serious maintenance problems.
What We Don’t Know
• Whether the plane was flying on autopilot or under the manual control of crew members.
• Why the plane descended after reaching its cruising altitude.
• Whether the plane suffered any kind of technical failure.
PARIS — Rescuers on Wednesday resumed the difficult task of searching for the 150 victims of a deadly plane crash in the French Alps, as France’s interior minister said that terrorism was not at the top of the list of potential causes.
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Germanwings Crash in French Alps Kills 150; Cockpit Voice Recorder Is FoundMARCH 24, 2015
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In German Town, a School-Year Highlight That Ended in DisasterMARCH 24, 2015
The plane, an Airbus A320 operated by the budget carrier Germanwings, was en route to Düsseldorf, Germany, from Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday morning when it lost altitude rapidly and slammed into the French Alps, killing all 144 passengers and six crew members on board.
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Map
The Germanwings plane crashed in a remote part of the French Alps.
Footage of the site showed a remote and craggy landscape dominated by imposing mountains. The French newspaper Le Monde noted that the impact of the crash was so severe that the plane had been reduced to pieces of “confetti,†creating a serious challenge for search teams and investigators.
Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, has characterized the crash as an accident. But as investigators reviewed one of the plane’s so-called black boxes, unanswered questions remained, including why the aircraft had descended for eight minutes before crashing, and why an aircraft with a good safety record had crashed in largely clear weather.
Speaking on the French radio station RTL, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Wednesday that terrorism was “not a privileged hypothesis at the moment†but that no theories had been definitively excluded.
Mr. Cazeneuve said the debris was spread over a wide area, suggesting that the aircraft most likely did not explode in the air but rather disintegrated on impact.
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Play Video|2:17
Details Offered in Germanwings Crash
Details Offered in Germanwings Crash
The managing director of Germanwings, Thomas Winkelmann, said the Airbus A320 rapidly lost altitude for more than eight minutes before crashing in the French Alps on Tuesday.
Video by AP on Publish Date March 24, 2015. Photo by Patrik Stollarz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.
He said that the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, the black box that had been recovered, was damaged but that investigators expected to be able to recover the conversations stored on its memory chip “in the coming hours.â€
Those conversations were the main piece of hard evidence that investigators had to work with as they tried to shed light on the circumstances surrounding the crash.
One of the main outstanding questions is why the pilots did not communicate with air traffic controllers as the plane began its unusual descent, suggesting that either the pilots or the plane’s automated systems may have been trying to maintain control of the aircraft as it lost altitude.
Among the theories that have been put forward by air safety analysts not involved in the investigation is the possibility that the pilots could have been incapacitated by a sudden event such as a fire or a drop in cabin pressure. Other paths the investigators will most likely explore include the possibility of a malfunction of the plane’s computers that prevented the pilots from controlling the aircraft.
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Timeline of the Crash
France’s air accident investigation bureau was expected to hold a briefing at its offices in Le Bourget, near Paris, on Wednesday afternoon. The agency, which is leading the technical inquiry into the crash, sent seven investigators to the crash site on Tuesday. They have been joined by their counterparts from Germany as well as by technical advisers from Airbus and CFM International, the manufacturer of the plane’s engines.
Speaking on Europe 1 radio, Jean-Paul Troadec, a former director of the French air accident investigation bureau, said that the analysis of the cockpit voice recorder would “help us to understand what happened in the final minutes of the flight.â€
“Nonetheless,†he added, “just having these recordings is not going to be sufficient†to make any definitive conclusions about the cause of the crash — a process that could take weeks, if not months.
As a first step, Mr. Troadec said the voice recordings would need to be synchronized with the contents of the second black box, the flight data recorder, which tracks roughly 1,300 statistics, including the plane’s position, speed, altitude and direction. Locating that recorder remained a priority for search teams.
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Play Video|3:16
Leaders on Germanwings Plane Crash
Leaders on Germanwings Plane Crash
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.
With more than 600 police officers and other emergency workers at the scene, Mr. Troadec said one of the big challenges for investigators would be to protect the debris at the crash site from any inadvertent damage.
“We need to ensure that all the evidence is well preserved,†Mr. Troadec said, referring both to the pieces of the plane littered across the steep slopes as well as to the remains of the victims. The identification of the victims will most likely require matching DNA from the remains with samples from relatives.
A team of 30 mountain rescue officers were to try to reach the remote crash site by helicopter early Wednesday, and 65 police officers were trying to get to it on foot, Lt. Col. Jean-Marc Menichini was quoted by Agence France-Presse as saying. He told the news agency that the search would last at least a week, and that it would take several days to recover the bodies.
President François Hollande of France, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain were expected to visit the crash site Wednesday afternoon to pay their respects and observe the search efforts.
The identities of the victims were expected to be released on Wednesday. The plane’s passengers, many of whom were German or Spanish, included 16 German high school students and two teachers who were returning from an exchange program near Barcelona. The Liceu opera house in Barcelona said on Tuesday that two singers who had been performing in Wagner’s “Siegfried†were also among the victims: the contralto Maria Radner and the baritone Oleg Bryjak.
Éric Sapet, a member of a mountain firefighters’ unit who had been at the crash site, was quoted by Le Monde as saying that the plane had been “pulverized†and that it was no longer possible to even tell that the scattered debris had once been an aircraft.
Martin Riecken, a spokesman for Lufthansa in Frankfurt, said late Tuesday that a small number of pilots and flight attendants had given notice that they would not fly on Wednesday.
“Our employees are very distressed,†he said, adding that Lufthansa crew members would be brought in to replace Germanwings employees as necessary. “People are in a state of shock.â€
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