A German airliner crashed near a ski resort in the French
Alps on Tuesday with all 148 people on board pronounced dead; in one of the
worst ever plane disasters in the country. France’s transport minister said
there were “no survivors” from the crash of the Germanwings Airbus A320. “The
circumstances of the accident, that are not yet clear, make us think there are
not thought to be any survivors,” President Francois Hollande told reporters.
The plane was travelling from the Spanish coastal city of
Barcelona to the German city of
Duesseldorf when it went down in the
Barcelonnette area in southeastern France. The airliner, which was carrying 142
passengers and six crew, issued a distress call at 10:47 am (0947 GMT), civil
aviation authorities said. “The debris of a passenger plane has been found in
the region of Barcelonette,” said interior ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry
Brandet.
He said “major rescue efforts” had been mobilised. The plane
belonged to Germanwings, a low-cost affiliate of German airline Lufthansa based
in Cologne which had no fatal accidents. The single-aisle A320 typically seats
150 to 180 people.
Crisis cell -
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve immediately headed to
the scene while Prime Minister Manuel Valls said he had called an
inter-ministerial crisis cell. “We don’t know the reasons for the crash, we
clearly fear that the 142-150 passengers
and personnel have been killed considering the circumstances of the crash,”
said Valls. “All is being done to understand what happened and to help the
families of the victims,” he said. Germanwings had no immediate comment on what
caused the crash.
“We have recently become aware of media reports speculating
on an incident though we still do not have any confirmed information,” it said
in a statement. “As soon as definite information is available, we shall inform
the media immediately,” it said, urging people to monitor its website
www.germanwings.com. A spokesman for Airbus, the European aerospace giant, said
it could not make any comment “for the moment”.
“We have no information on the circumstances of the
accident,” the spokesman told pressmen adding that the company had opened a
“crisis cell”. In July 2000, an Air France Concorde crashed shortly after
take-off from Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport en route for New York, leaving
113 people, mainly Germans dead and eventually leading to the supersonic
airliner being taken out of service.
The world’s worst air disasters remain the March 27, 1977,
collision of two Boeing 747s on the runway at Tenerife in the Canary Islands,
killing 583 people, and the August 12, 1985 crash into a mountainside of a
Boeing 747 belonging to Japan Airlines, killing 520 people. France’s leading
air traffic controller union SNCTA called off a strike planned from Wednesday
to Friday after news of the crash. “We are suspending our planned strike as a
result of the emotions created in the control rooms by the crash, particularly
in Aix-en-Provence,” the union’s spokesman Roger Rousseau told newsmen.
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