This will be quick: news services are reporting a Germanwings Flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf has gone down in the French Pyrenees Alps after take-off with 142 passengers and 6 crew aboard.
The crash site has been verified by helicopter and is in a rugged and inaccessible area, with debris scattered and an assumption of no survivors.
The Guardian - Lead Story
A passenger plane for the airline Germanwings flying from Barcelona to Dusseldorf has crashed in a remote and mountainous area of southern France, officials have confirmed.
The Airbus A320 making the flight for Lufthansa’s lowcost arm, Germanwings, crashed near the small mountain village of Barcelonette in the southern Alps. It had made a distress call at 10.47am then disappeared off the radar at around 11.20am, Le Figaro reported.
At least 142 passengers and six crew-members on board. Spain’s airport operator confirmed Spanish nationals were on board but would not say how many. A spokesman for France’s interior ministry said the passenger manifest was being verified.
The plane crashed at 2,000 metres altitude in the Alps, in the commune of Meolans-Revels. Gilles Gravier, president of Tourism in the Val d’Allos ski resort area, said nothing of the crash had been heard from the pistes in his village. He said 400 gendarmes, firefighters and emergency search and rescue personnel had been mobilised but the zone was “extremely difficult” to get to.
Florent Plazy, director of the local ski school ESF, confirmed the area was hard to access even for mountain walkers.
Eric Ciotti, the head of the regional council, said search-and-rescue teams were headed to the crash site but Pierre-Henry Brandet, the interior ministry spokesman, told BFM television that he expected “an extremely long and extremely difficult” operation because of the area’s remoteness.
The French president, François Hollande, said it was likely there were no survivors.
The Guardian - Live Blog
Before going down the pilot made distress calls and appears to have been fighting for control and attempting a controlled landing after recovering from a sudden loss of air speed.
IOW, he seemed to be following the first priority of "Aviate - Navigate - Communicate".
Peace.
5:52 AM PT: Now reporting the passenger count was 144 and crew 6.