Seyne, France: Investigators combed through the pulverised wreckage of a German airliner on Wednesday and examined its badly damaged black box for clues as to what caused the mysterious crash that killed all 150 aboard.
Hundreds of firefighters and police near the hamlet of Le Vernet in the French Alps launched a massive operation at the rugged crash site, accessible only by helicopter or an arduous hike on foot.
Meanwhile in Paris, experts began analysing one of the plane’s black boxes hoping to discover why the Germanwings Airbus A320 went down in good weather - an “inexplicable” disaster according to Lufthansa, the budget airline’s parent company.
Photos issued by the BEA air crash investigation office showed a mangled orange “black box”, its metal casing twisted badly out of shape by the violence of the impact.
French President Francois Hollande and his counterparts from Germany and Spain were due to visit the crash site at 2pm (1300 GMT) to pay their respects to the mainly German and Spanish victims of the air disaster, the worst in France for decades.
And relatives of the dead were to arrive Wednesday at a village near the crash site, where a counselling centre had been established.
Officials in Spain said at least 49 Spaniards had been killed in the accident and Germanwings said at least 72 Germans were dead.
Transport Minister Alain Vidalies said that if voices have been recorded, the investigation would proceed “fairly quickly.”
“After that, if we have to analyse the sounds, that’s a job that will take several weeks, but it’s a job that can offer us some explanations,” Vidalies told French radio.
Local prosecutor Brice Robin said initial elements could be available from the “very badly damaged” black box later on Wednesday but warned “it could take several days to have all the results.”
A second black box, recording technical flight data, has yet to be found.
Officials are scrambling to explain why the plane suddenly entered a fatal eight-minute descent shortly after reaching cruising altitude on its route between Barcelona and Duesseldorf.
No distress signal was sent and the crew failed to respond to desperate attempts at contact from ground control.
“It is inexplicable,” Lufthansa chief Carsten Spohr said in Frankfurt.
“The plane was in perfect condition and the two pilots were experienced.”
French police set up road blocks near the crash site, ordering all non-official vehicles to turn around, an AFP reporter on the scene said.
Just beyond lay a steep and broken landscape littered with the shattered pieces of what was flight 4U9525.
“It’s a zone that is very difficult to access, very slippery. There was rain and snow overnight. So we need to secure the zone before the investigators begin their work,” a spokesman for the French interior ministry, Pierre-Henry Brandet, told reporters.
“We are not in a race against time,” he said. “We need to move forward methodically.”
The plane was “totally destroyed”, a local member of parliament who flew over the site said, describing the scene as “horrendous”.
“The biggest body parts we identified are no bigger than a briefcase,” one investigator said.
More than 300 policemen and 380 firefighters have been mobilised for the grisly task of searching the site.
The plane was carrying six crew and 144 passengers, including 16 German teenagers returning home from a school trip.
Their high school in the small German town of Haltern was to hold a memorial event Wednesday to honour the victims.
“This is certainly the darkest day in the history of our city,” said a tearful Bodo Klimpel, the town’s mayor. “It is the worst thing you can imagine.”
Opera singers Oleg Bryjak, 54, and Maria Radner, 33, were also on board, flying to their home city of Duesseldorf. Radner was travelling with her husband and baby, one of two infants on board the plane.
In Spain, meanwhile, a minute’s silence was observed at noon at countless points around the country, including both houses of parliament in Madrid and public offices.
As the probe gathered pace, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said investigators were not focusing on the possibility it was a terrorist attack.
Germanwings, the growing low-cost subsidiary of the prestigious Lufthansa carrier, had an unblemished safety record.
Weather did not appear to be a factor in the crash, with conditions calm at the time, French weather officials said.
It was the deadliest air crash on the French mainland since 1974 when a Turkish Airlines plane crashed, killing 346 people.
Victims were also confirmed from Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Britain, Colombia, Denmark, Holland, Israel, Japan, Mexico and the United States, according to officials.
