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At least 70 people were feared dead after a Russian plane travelling from Moscow to Barcelona ignored warnings from ground control and collided with a cargo plane over southern Germany late on Monday.
Officials said on Tuesday the two aircraft collided in midair at 2140 GMT [0310 IST] above Lake Constance on the German-Swiss border, spreading debris over a wide area and setting a number of buildings, including a school, on fire.
"I was lying in my bed, saw a ball of fire in the sky and ran out onto the balcony. Behind the forest it looked like a firework display was going off," said Klaus-Dieter Schindler, janitor at a school in the village of Owingen.
"In the glow of the fire I saw wreckage falling out of the sky. It looked like black rain."
The landing gear of the Tupolev lay burning just a few hundred metres away.
Ulrich Mueller, transport minister in the German state where the accident occurred, said Swiss air traffic control had repeatedly told the Russian Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev 154 to reduce altitude to avoid a crash.
The pilot ignored the requests and, despite efforts by the Boeing 757 cargo plane to avoid an accident, the two planes collided.
"Ground control demanded that the Tupolev lower its altitude. Despite several calls, it did not react," Mueller said. "We have to assume right now that this was a misunderstanding."
Hans-Peter Walser, regional police chief in the southwest German city of Ueberlingen, added: "At the moment there are no reasons to believe this has a criminal background."
Rescue workers found 11 bodies and the Tupolev's flight data recorder, vital for investigating the accident.
Death Toll Still Unclear
Officials in Germany and Russia gave differing accounts of the number of passengers.
An official at Moscow's Domodedovo airport said there were 12 crew and 57 passengers on board. German officials said more than 80 may have been there.
The Boeing 757 cargo plane carried two pilots.
Hundreds of police and firefighters raced to a scene of the wreckage and fires. German television showed the charred tail of the Russian plane in a darkened field. Police and rescue workers searched the field with flashlights.
"What I saw looked like a big dark orange light that lasted several seconds and changed in size, first big then small," one witness told German radio.
The airline, based in Russia's oil-rich Muslim Republic of Bashkortostan, was one of many to emerge from the break-up of state airliner Aeroflot after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It relies mainly on a fleet of Tu-154s, one of the most common Russian planes used for medium-range flights.
The two planes were flying at an altitude of 12,000 metres [39,370 feet] above Ueberlingen on the northwest end of Lake Constance when they collided, officials said.
A spokeswoman for German flight control said there could be two reasons why the crash occured: either ground controllers had entered incorrect data for the flight paths, or one of the two planes had failed to follow its approved flight path.
German officials said both planes were under Swiss flight control in Zurich at the time of the accident. Swiss air control officials confirmed that was the case.
Regional official Siegfried Tann said the falling wreckage damaged houses, which were on fire. A section of forest in the Lake Constance region was also burning.
The cargo plane, operated by Deutsche Post AG freight unit DHL Worldwide Express, had taken off from Bergamo in Italy and was en route to Brussels. The flight had originated in Bahrain, police said. The Bashkirian plane had made a stop in Munich before heading for Barcelona.
Midair collisions are rare. The worst such accident took place in 1996 when a Saudi Arabian Boeing 747 and a Kazakhstan Ilyushin 11-76 cargo plane collided in mid-air over India, killing 349 people.
Tupolev 154s have crashed several times over the past year. An Iran Air Tours TU-154 crashed in February in Iran killing all 119 aboard. A year ago 136 passengers and nine crew were killed when a Tu-154 crashed near the Siberian city of Irkutsk.
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