Stumped investigators said Wednesday they had no clue yet about what caused the jetliner crash in the French Alps that killed 150 people, including a mother and daughter from Virginia and another, unidentified US citizen.
“At this stage, clearly, we are not in a position to have the slightest explanation or interpretation on the reasons that could have led this plane to descend, or the reasons why it did not respond to attempts to contact it by air traffic controllers,” said Remi Jouty, head of the French air investigation agency.
But that should change after authorities analyze cockpit voice recordings extracted from a heavily damaged black box that was recovered from Germanwings Flight 9525.
Investigators say they have extracted a recording of “voices, sounds and alarms” from the cockpit recorder, The Guardian reported.
But they refused to say more about what the cockpit recording contained or what it could mean.
“We have had this for a few minutes and we cannot say who is speaking. It takes time to understand these things. It’s too soon to draw conclusions about what happened,” Jouty said.
Authorities said they had also found the plane’s battered second black box – which would record air speed, altitude and other flight data – but that the box’s memory card had been jarred loose by the crash impact and was missing.
“There were some problems to read the data, it was good news and a relief for us,” he said. “We have been able to extract audio files that we can use.”
Authorities are focusing on a key couple of minutes — 10:30-10:31 a.m. — when the crew lost radio contact before the Airbus 320 crashed, leaving debris scattered across the rugged terrain about 6,550 feet above sea level.
French officials, meanwhile, said terrorism appeared unlikely, and Germany’s top security official said Wednesday there was no evidence of foul play.
Jouty said the plane was flying “until the end” before it smashed into the mountainside, well below its previous cruising altitude of 38,000 feet.
He said the final communication from the plane was a routine message about permission to continue on its route. He would not speculate on possible causes of the crash or rule anything out.
French President Francois Hollande, meanwhile, said the case for the plane’s second black box had been found but not its contents.
Jouty refused to confirm that about the flight data recorder, which captures 25 hours’ worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane.
Helicopters surveying the plane’s scattered debris lifted off at daybreak for a look at the craggy ravine while emergency crews hiked through snow and rain over the steep, rocky terrain to the high-altitude crash site.
In all, more than 600 rescue workers and aviation investigators were in the area, French officials said.
The crash left pieces of wreckage “so small and shiny they appear like patches of snow on the mountainside,” Pierre-Henry Brandet, the Interior Ministry spokesman, said after flying over the debris field.
The plane, operated by 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.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr, himself a pilot, said he found the crash of a plane piloted by two experienced captains “inexplicable.”
The four possible causes of any crash are human error, mechanical problems, weather, criminal activity or a combination of two or more.
Investigators will use the cockpit voice and flight data recorders to map out and focus their work, said Alan E. Diehl, a former air safety investigator with the National Transportation Safety Board.
“Both will point you in directions of what is critical,” Diehl says. “Based on what you learn from the recorders, you might focus on key pieces of wreckage.”
Diehl says investigators will essentially work backward.
“You’re usually dealing with a jigsaw puzzle with many of the pieces missing,” he says. “You start eliminating things that didn’t happen.”
Lufthansa said two charter flights to France will be made available for family members who want to get as close as they can to the crash site. Locals in Seyne-les-Alpes offered to host the bereaved families due to a shortage of rooms to rent.
Germanwings itself cancelled several flights Wednesday because some crews declared themselves unfit to fly after losing colleagues.
“The management completely understands this, because we are a small family. Everyone knows everybody inside Germanwings, so it is a big shock for employees,” said CEO Thomas Winkelmann.
The victims included two babies, two opera singers, an Australian mother and son vacationing together, and 16 German high school students and two teachers returning from an exchange program in Spain.
The principal of Joseph Koenig High School, Ulrich Wessel, called the loss of 16 of his students and two teachers — one who had just gotten married and another who was soon to be — a “tragedy that renders one speechless.”
“Nothing will be the way it was at our school anymore,” he said.
Paul Andrew Bramley, a 28-year-old from Britain, had been studying hospitality and hotel management in Lucerne and was flying to meet his mother before starting an internship on April 1.
“He was the best son. He was my world,” said his mother, Carol Bramley.
In Spain, flags flew at half-staff on government buildings and a minute of silence was held in government offices across the country. Parliament canceled its Wednesday session.
Barcelona’s Liceu opera house held two minutes of silence at noon to honor two German opera singers — Oleg Bryjak and Maria Radner — who took the flight after performing at the theater last weekend.