CRASH TIMELINE
Here is a look at the short journey and violent end of the German budget airline flight that crashed into the French Alps with 150 people aboard.
Monday
The plane, a Germanwings Airbus A320, undergoes a routine safety check at Duesseldorf Airport.
Tuesday, 8:57 a.m.
The 24-year-old A320 single-aisle jet arrives in Barcelona from Duesseldorf.
10:01 a.m.
Germanwings Flight 9525 takes off from Barcelona, slightly delayed because of airport congestion, for the return trip to Duesseldorf, about 800 miles away. Aboard were 144 passengers, two pilots and four cabin staff.
10:30 a.m.
The pilots make their last contact with air traffic control in a routine message seeking and obtaining permission to continue course. At the time, the aircraft had reached its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, and was over the Mediterranean Sea approaching the region around Marseille.
10:31 a.m.
The plane begins its unexplained descent above the French coast, just as its flight path crosses over land.
10:35 a.m.
Air traffic controllers try to contact the pilots, but receive no response.
10:40 a.m.
The last radar position of the plane is registered, at 6,175 feet — only slightly higher than the peaks of the southern French Alps below. The French Air Force sends a Mirage fighter jet to the plane’s last known location.
About noon
Rescuers in helicopters spot the debris, scattered across a ravine and the slopes of the Col de Mariaud. Amid the pulverized remains, there are no survivors.
Associated Press
The mangled black box recovered from a crashed German jetliner has yielded sounds and voices, but so far not the “slightest explanation” why the plane plunged into an French mountainside, killing all 150 on board, the lead investigator said Wednesday.
The last communication from Germanwings Flight 9525, midway through a flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf on Tuesday, was a routine request for permission to continue on its route, which was granted, said Remi Jouty, the head of the BEA, France’s accident investigation bureau.
Minutes later, at 10:30 a.m., the Airbus A320 inexplicably began to descend. Within 10 minutes it had plunged some 32,000 feet from its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, slamming into the remote mountainside at an elevation just above 6,000 feet, Jouty said.
With no distress call or other indication of anything out of the ordinary, French investigators struggled Wednesday to solve the mystery. While alarming, the descent was still gradual enough to suggest the plane was under the control of its navigators.
“The descent is compatible with a plane controlled by pilots,” Jouty said. “It is also compatible with a plane controlled by automatic pilot.”
“At this point, there is no explanation,” he added. “One doesn’t imagine that the pilot consciously sends his plane into a mountain.”
Jouty said “sounds and voices” were registered on the digital audio file recovered from the first black box, retrieved six hours after the crash and delivered Wednesday to investigators. He did not divulge the contents, insisting time was needed to decipher them.
Confusion surrounded the fate of the second black box. French President Francois Hollande said the casing of the flight data recorder had been found in the scattered debris, but was missing the memory card that captures 25 hours’ worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane. However, Jouty refused to confirm the box had been located.
French officials said terrorism appeared unlikely and Germany’s top security official said there was no evidence of foul play.
As authorities struggled to unravel the puzzle, Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy converged on the remote accident site to pay their respects to the dead — mostly German and Spanish citizens, though people of 17 other nationalities, including three Americans, were aboard.
“This is a true tragedy, and the visit here has shown us that,” Merkel said.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr, himself a pilot, said he found the crash of a plane flown by two experienced captains while at cruising altitude “inexplicable.” Cruising is considered the safest part of a flight, with only about 10 percent of crashes occurring at that altitude.
“We still cannot understand what happened there yesterday,” he said. “Lufthansa has never in its history lost an aircraft in cruise flight and we cannot understand how an airplane that was in perfect technical condition, with two experienced and trained Lufthansa pilots, was involved in such a terrible accident.”
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Throughout Wednesday, helicopters ferried rescue workers and other personnel to the crash site. More than 600 rescue and security workers and aviation investigators were on site, French officials said.
Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann said the airline was in the process of contacting victims’ families. He said the 144 passengers and six crew members included 72 Germans, 35 Spaniards, three Americans and two people each from Australia, Argentina, Iran, Venezuela, and one person each from Britain, the Netherlands, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Denmark, Belgium and Israel.
The three Americans included a mother and daughter, the U.S. State Department said. Some of the victims may have had dual nationalities; Spain’s government said 51 citizens had died in the crash.
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Two babies, two opera singers and 16 German high school students and their teachers returning from an exchange program in Spain were among those who lost their lives.
The principal of Joseph Koenig High School, Ulrich Wessel, called the loss a “tragedy that renders one speechless.”
In Spain, flags flew at half-staff on government buildings and a minute of silence was held in government offices across the country. Parliament canceled its Wednesday session.
Barcelona’s Liceu opera house observed two minutes of silence at noon to honor the two German opera singers, Oleg Bryjak and Maria Radner, who were returning home after a weekend performance at the theater.
Germanwings canceled several flights Wednesday because some crews declared themselves unfit to fly after losing colleagues.
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