Problems for rescue services as weather closes in at remote site
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AN Airbus operated by Lufthansa’s Germanwings budget airline crashed in a remote snowy area of the French Alps yesterday, killing all 150 on board including 16 schoolchildren.
Germanwings confirmed its flight 4U 9525 from Barcelona to Duesseldorf crashed with 144 passengers and six crew on board.
The airline believed there were 67 Germans on the flight. Spain’s deputy prime minister said 45 passengers had Spanish names.
Among the victims were 16 children and two teachers from the Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium high school in the town of Haltern am See in northwest Germany, a spokeswoman said.
“There were 16 children and two teachers who had spent a week here. The children were aged about 15,” Marti Pujol, mayor of the village of Llinars de Valles near Barcelona, told reporters.
They had left to catch the flight yesterday morning, he said.
No Chinese passengers were onboard the plane, Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann told a press conference in Cologne.
He said the captain of the plane, who had worked for Lufthansa and Germanwings for 10 years, had more than 6,000 flight hours, while the aircraft had 58,300 flight hours.
French police at the crash site said no one survived and it would take days to recover the bodies due to difficult terrain.
“It is going to take days to recover the victims, then the debris,” senior police officer Jean-Paul Bloy told reporters.
In Paris, Prime Minister Manuel Valls told parliament: “A helicopter managed to land (by the crash site) and has confirmed that unfortunately there were no survivors.”
It was the first crash of a large passenger jet on French soil since the Concorde disaster just outside Paris nearly 15 years ago.
The A320 is a workhorse of worldwide aviation fleets.
They are the world’s most used passenger jets and have a good, though not unblemished, safety record.
Germanwings said the plane started descending one minute after reaching its cruising height and continued losing altitude for eight minutes.
“The aircraft’s contact with French radar, French air traffic controllers ended at 10:53am at an altitude of about 6,000 feet. The plane then crashed,” Winkelmann told a news conference.
Winkelmann also said that routine maintenance of the aircraft was performed by Lufthansa on Monday.
Germanwings said it was unclear what caused its Airbus A320 aircraft to crash but that there had been no problems with the plane before takeoff.
“There were no anomalies on the plane,” Winkelmann said.
He said Airbus delivered the plane to Lufthansa in 1991, after which it flew exclusively for the German flagship carrier until it was transferred to Germanwings’ fleet last year. That makes the aircraft older than the 11.5-year average age of Lufthansa’s fleet of 615 planes.
“That is acceptable because maintenance standards inside the Lufthansa group are known as very high worldwide.
“As long as you have your maintenance schedule in place and follow all the procedures together with the manufacturer, there is absolutely no issue with the age of an airplane,” Winkelmann said.
A spokeswoman for the US National Security Council said there were no indication the plane crash in the French Alps was the result of terrorism.
France’s DGAC aviation authority said air traffic controllers initiated distress procedures after they lost contact with the Airbus, which did not issue a distress call.
The accident happened in an alpine region known for skiing, hiking and rafting, but which is hard for rescue services to reach.
The search and rescue effort based itself in a gymnasium in the village of Seyne-les-Alpes, which has a small private aerodrome nearby.
Transport Minister Alain Vidalies told local media: “This is a zone covered in snow, inaccessible to vehicles but which helicopters will be able to fly over.”
But as helicopters and emergency vehicles assembled, the weather was reported to be closing in.
“There will be a lot of cloud cover this afternoon, with local storms, snow above 1,800 meters and relatively low clouds. That will not help the helicopters in their work,” an official from the local weather centre told reporters.
Lufthansa Chief Executive Carsten Spohr, who planned to go to the crash site, spoke of a “dark day for Lufthansa.”
“My deepest sympathy goes to the families and friends of our passengers and crew,” Lufthansa said on Twitter, citing Spohr.
French aviation authorities said the airliner crashed near the town of Barcelonnette, not far from the Italian border.
Accident investigators were heading for the crash site in Meolans-Revel, a sparsely inhabited commune.
Airbus confirmed the plane was 24 years old and powered by engines made by CFM International, a joint venture between General Electric and France’s Safran.
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