Germanwings A320 crash: Investigators begin examining black box

French air investigators are examining one of the black boxes of the doomed Germanwings plane to find out why the aircraft crashed into a mountain in the French Alps, killing the 150 people on board.

The dented, twisted and scarred cockpit voice recorder was being mined by investigators for clues into what sent the Germanwings Airbus 320 into a mid-flight dive on Tuesday after pilots lost radio contact over the southern French Alps during a routine flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf.

Germany’s top security official said there was no evidence of foul play.

The 24-year-old Airbus A320 was en route from the Spanish city of Barcelona to Dusseldorf in Germany when it went down just before 11 a.m. local time on Tuesday, scattering wreckage across more than four acres of craggy terrain near the village of Digne-Les-Bains in southeastern France.

French officials estimated that it would take “at least a week” to scour the remote site. More than 300 policemen and 380 firefighters have been mobilized in the effort.

“The black box is damaged and must be reconstituted in the coming hours in order to be useable,” French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told RTL radio.

Key to the investigation is what happened in the two minutes of 10:30 am and 10:31 am (local time), said Segolene Royal, a top government minister whose portfolio includes transport. From then on, air traffic controllers were unable to make contact with the plane.

The flight data recorder, which Cazeneuve said has not been retrieved yet, captures 25 hours' worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane.

German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in Berlin that “according to the latest information there is no hard evidence that the crash was intentionally brought about by third parties.”

Royal and Cazeneuve both emphasised that terrorism is considered unlikely. 

Investigators retrieving data from the recorder will focus first “on the human voices, the conversations” followed by the cockpit sounds, Transport Secretary Alain Vidalies told Europe 1 radio. He said the government planned to release information gleaned from the black box as soon as it can be verified.

Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann said the company was already in contact with families of 123 victims and trying to reach relatives of the remaining 27.

He said victims included 72 German citizens, 35 Spanish, two people each from Australia, Argentina, Iran, Venezuela and the US and one person each from Britain, the Netherlands, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Denmark, Belgium and Israel. Some could have dual nationalities.

They included two babies, two opera singers, an Australian mother and son vacationing together, and 16 German high school students and their two teachers returning from an exchange program in Spain.

“Nothing will be the way it was at our school anymore,” said Ulrich Wessel, the principal of JosephKoenigHigh School in the German town of Haltern.

“I was asked yesterday how many students there are at the high school in Haltern, and I said 1,283 without thinking then had to say afterward, unfortunately, 16 fewer since yesterday.  And I find that so terrible,” he added.

The plane, operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, was less than an hour from landing in Duesseldorf when it unexpectedly went into a rapid eight-minute descent. The pilots sent out no distress call, France’s aviation authority said.