Paris - The jet that crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday, killing all 150 people on board, had been grounded 24 hours earlier, it emerged on Tuesday night.
The Airbus A320 had suffered technical issues, including a landing gear problem. The revelation will put pressure on owner Germanwings to explain why the plane was allowed to fly.
The plane, operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, was less than an hour from landing in Dusseldorf on a flight from Barcelona when it unexpectedly went into a rapid 8-minute descent on Tuesday. The pilots sent out no distress call and had lost radio contact with their control centre, France's aviation authority said.
Germanwings said 144 passengers and six crew members were on board. Authorities said 67 Germans were believed to be among the victims, including 16 high school students and two opera singers, as well as many Spaniards, two Australians and one person each from The Netherlands, Turkey and Denmark. In Japan, the government said two Japanese citizens were believed to be on the plane.
On Tuesday night, urgent safety checks were being carried out on other A320s, which are popular with budget airlines.
Plane ‘didn’t fall out of the sky’
Experts said Flight 4U 9525’s rate of descent did not suggest it had simply fallen out of the sky - prompting speculation that the pilots may have suddenly fallen unconscious. As the French authorities appeared to rule out terrorism, it also emerged that:
* Five years ago two pilots from the same Germanwings airline nearly passed out as they landed in Cologne and contaminated air was suspected;
* It is the third serious incident involving the Airbus “family” in the last six months - two of them fatal crashes that have left more than 300 dead;
* A safety warning was issued last November after a sister plane went into an uncontrollable dive over Spain, falling at a rate of 4 000 feet per minute before the pilot managed to regain control.
Germanwings chief executive Thomas Winkelmann said the aircraft began descending again shortly after it reached its cruising height of 38 000 feet, having taken off from Barcelona at about 10am local time.
It started losing altitude at around 10.33am, with the speed reportedly increasing to about 880km/h.
The last reported radar returns had the aircraft descending to 6 800 feet at about 690km/h eight minutes later.
Pilot was experienced
Winkelmann said the captain on board was experienced and had been with Germanwings’ parent company, Lufthansa, for more than 10 years, having clocked up 6 000 flying hours. The plane, he said, had had a normal service at Dusseldorf on Monday and its last major check-up had been in the summer of 2013. It flew regularly to London and was there last Sunday.
Aviation expert Chris Yates said it was difficult to explain why the pilots would not send an emergency call. “Air crash investigators will need to examine the black boxes, the flight data recorder and the voice recorder to determine exactly what happened,” he said.
“It is possible that the pilots sent a distress signal that was not received by air traffic control.”
On Wednesday, helicopters surveying the scattered debris lifted off at daybreak as investigators sought clues in the wreckage and the black box.
While investigators searched through debris from Flight 9525 on steep and desolate slopes, families across Europe and beyond reeled in shock. French authorities set up a chapel in a gymnasium as a space to mourn.
“The site is a picture of horror. The grief of the families and friends is immeasurable,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said after being flown over the crash scene. “We must now stand together. We are united in our great grief.”
Black box may provide answers
Pierre-Henry Brandet, spokesman for France's Interior Ministry, says investigators are working to recover information from the black box retrieved from the scene of the crash. Brandet told French network iTele that recovery crews are expected to reach the site where the Germanwings plane went down sometime on Wednesday morning.
He said no causes had been ruled out in the crash.
The White House and the airline chief said there was no sign that terrorism was involved, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel cautioned against speculating on the cause.
It took investigators hours to reach the site, led by mountain guides to the craggy ravine in the southern French Alps, not far from the Italian border and the French Riviera.
Video shot from a helicopter and aired by BFM TV showed rescuers walking in the crevices of a rocky mountainside scattered with plane parts. Photos of the crash site showed white flecks of debris across a mountain and larger airplane body sections with windows. A helicopter crew that landed briefly in the area saw no signs of life, French officials said.
“Everything is pulverised. The largest pieces of debris are the size of a small car. No one can access the site from the ground,” Gilbert Sauvan, president of the general council, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, told The Associated Press.
“This is pretty much the worst thing you can imagine,” said Bodo Klimpel, mayor of the German town of Haltern, rent with sorrow after losing 16 tenth graders and their two teachers from a local high school.
Merkel and Hollande to visit crash site
Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy were to visit the crash site on Wednesday.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said one of two black boxes was retrieved from the site and “will be immediately investigated”.
He did not say whether it was the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder, but a source close to the inquiry said on Wednesday that the cockpit voice recorder had been found damaged and has been taken to Paris for analysis.
“The black box that was found is the CVR,” the source told AFP on condition of anonymity. The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) “was damaged. It has been transferred to Paris this morning”.
A second so-called black box, in this case recording flight data, has yet to be found.
The two devices - actually orange boxes designed to survive extreme heat and pressure - should provide investigators with a second-by-second timeline of the plane's flight.
The voice recorder takes audio feeds from four microphones within the cockpit and records all the conversations between the pilots, air traffic controllers as well as any noises heard in the cockpit. The flight data recorder captures 25 hours' worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane.
Crash regarded as ‘accident’ for now
Lufthansa Vice-President Heike Birlenbach told reporters in Barcelona that for now “we say it is an accident”.
Germanwings is a low-cost carrier owned by Lufthansa, Germany's biggest airline, and serves mostly European destinations. Tuesday's crash was its first involving passenger deaths since it began operating in 2002. The Germanwings logo, normally maroon and yellow, was blacked out on its Twitter feed.
Authorities faced a long and difficult search-and-recovery operation because of the area's remoteness. Temperatures early on Wednesday hovered just above freezing, and snow coated nearby mountaintops.
French Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said the crash site covered several acres, with thousands of pieces of debris, “which leads us to think the impact must have been extremely violent at very high speed”.
The last time a passenger jet crashed in France was the 2000 Concorde supersonic jet accident, which left 113 dead.
Daily Mail, Sapa-AP and AFP