- 12:54 p.m. ET: The doomed Germanwings plane is obliterated, with no piece of debris larger than a "small car," said Gilbert Sauvan, the president of Alpes de Haute Provence region.
Sauvan, a high-level official who is being briefed on the operation, said that human remains are strewn for several hundred meters. Helicopters have flown over the crash site but have not been able to land.
Authorities may not be able to retrieve any bodies Tuesday, according to Sauvan, with the frozen ground complicating the effort. Wednesday may not be much easier, with snow in the forecast.
- 12:20 p.m. ET: There were 144 passengers (including two babies) and six crew members aboard Germanwings Flight 9525, an airline spokesperson said.
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Full story:A Germanwings Airbus A320 plane crashed Tuesday in the foothills of the Alps in southeastern France with at least 150 people on board, according to Germanwings managing director Oliver Wagner.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls told reporters he fears all those aboard the flight from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany. The plane crashed near Digne-les-Bains, in the Alpes de Haute Provence region, Valls said.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/24/europe/france-plane-crash/index.htmlIt is a really bad news
. All my support to the families
In one of the most chilling segments of this morning's press conference describing what was found on the cockpit voice recorder, screams were heard from passengers and crew as the realisation of what was about to happen struck them all. Prosecutor Brice Robin's findings state that when the German Captain left the cockpit - following what appeared to be - the 28-year-old German co-pilot (who was alive to the end) refused to re-open the door and began an "intentional", "controlled", and "steady" descent as he "seems to have sought to destroy the plane." Nothing indicates that this was a terrorist incident.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-03-26/germanwings-co-pilot-deliberately-destroyed-airplane-identified-28-year-old-german-cA very interesting read:
The Germanwings tragedy: inside the mind of a pilot (by Michael Bloomfield)http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/27/germanwings-tragedy-pilot-psychiatrist-psychological-evaluation-andreas-lubitz<< French prosecutors have reported that first officer Andreas Lubitz appeared to want to destroy the aircraft carrying 149 innocent people aboard Germanwings flight 4U9525. As a qualified pilot and a psychiatrist, I have since repeatedly imagined nightmare scenarios in that cockpit. Although we will never know what was truly going through Lubitz's mind as the aircraft plunged, one of the many alarming aspects of this tragedy is that his depression is being quickly blamed. Obviously depression cannot be the sole cause of a likely mass murder. Understanding this could yield many important lessons, and for now, the black box flight recorder will continue to yield vital information. (...) >>
(Michael Bloomfield is a research fellow in psychiatry at Imperial College London)
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