The budget airline lost an aircraft along with its passengers and crew on Tuesday morning.
A German passenger plane crashed on its way to Düsseldorf from Barcelona, Spain on Tuesday morning. The aircraft was an Airbus 320 belonging to the budget airline Germanwings, a subsidiary of Lufthansa, and held 150 including passengers and crew. The Prime Minister of France Manuel Valls said that there were no survivors in the plane crash.
The aircraft lost altitude quickly for more than eight minutes and descended to an altitude of 6,000 feet before French air traffic lost contact with the plane. Passengers were mostly from Germany and Spain.
Remains of the plane were found by a French helicopter near Prads-Haute-Bleone, a town in the French Alps. The mountainous region where the crash occurred is isolated and has very few residents this time of year, stated an anonymous official in the area. French President Fracois Hollande stated that the crash site is difficult to reach because there are no roads that lead to the area.
More than 400 police and rescue members have been employed in attending to the crash. Reportedly, one of the black boxes, which contains voice recordings of the pilots during the flight as well as any alarms during the flight, has been found. The other black box, which is undiscovered, contains over a thousand statistics regarding the plane's flight pattern.
It is unclear what caused the plane to lose altitude in such a fashion. The plane passed a safety inspection back in the summer. The nature of the plane's fall in altitude is irregular compared to other planes that experienced flight issues such as stalled engines. The weather conditions were reportedly calm.
There were no French passengers onboard the plane. President Hollande commented on the crash, expressing his condolences to the families of the victims. "We must feel grief, because this is a tragedy that happened on our soil,” he said. “I want to make sure that there have been no other consequences as the accident happened in a very difficult area to access, and I do not know yet if there were houses nearby. We will know in the next few hours. In the meantime, we must show support."
Angela Merkel of Germany also expressed her sorrow to the families of the victims, many of whom were German. "I feel terribly sorry, because so many people died in this disaster. Our thoughts and prayers are with these people," said Ms. Merkel.
"We are all deeply moved and will do everything we can to help the families of the victims," said the Prime Minister of Spain Mariano Rajoy.
French officials have set up command centers near the crash site and are currently investigating the events leading up to the crash.
