Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Two Americans on Germanwings Plane, Official Says - ABC News




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Two Americans were on board the Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps Tuesday, according to Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann.


Earlier, French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told reporters one American was on the plane. The U.S. State Department has not confirmed that any Americans were on board.


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 from the plane is damaged. Even so, said the official, Bernard Cazeneuve, the information on the recorder should be retrievable.


The CEO of Lufthansa, which owns Germanwings, 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 taken from the mountain 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.


In addition to 72 Germans, 35 Spanish and two Americans on board, Winkelmann, the Germanwings CEO, said there were two victims each from Australia, Argentina, Iran and Venezuela. One victim each came from Britain, the Netherlands, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Denmark, Belgium and Israel, he said, adding that the list isn't yet final because the company is still trying to contact relatives of 27 victims. Winkelmann added that in some cases victims' nationality weren’t clear because of possible dual citizenship.


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 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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