Germanwings plane crash: What we know so far

An Airbus 320, operated  by Lufthansa's Germanwings budget airline crashed in southern France on Tuesday en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf killing all 150 people on board. This is what we know so far about the accident, the victims and the recovery efforts.

Australians Greig and Carol Friday were among 150 people killed on board the Germanwings flight. Photo: Supplied

The victims

Authorities said 150 people were on board flight 4U9525, including 144 passengers and six crew members when it crashed. The passengers included Spaniards,Turks, two Australians, and at least 67 Germans, among them 16 high school students and two teachers who were returning from a study program near Barcelona. The two Australians were Melbourne mother and son Carol and Greig Friday, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop confirmed. 

Opera stars bass-baritone Oleg Bryjak, 54, and contralto Maria Radner, 33, were also on board, flying to their home city of Dusseldorf after starring in Richard Wagner's Siegfried at Barcelona's opera house, the Gran Teatre del Liceu. Radner was travelling with her husband and baby, according to the BBC.

The Germanwings flight 4U9525 was off course as reported by live air traffic website FlightRadar24. Photo: FlightRadar24

The crash site

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The plane crashed near the town of Barcelonnette about 100 kilometres north of the French Riviera city of Nice in the south of France.

Aerial footage of the crash site showed fragments of debris scattered over a large area on the mountain slopes.

The flight

The aircraft landed in Barcelona at 7.57 GMT and had  a scheduled take-off time of 8.35. It had been grounded in Dusseldorf earlier in the day for an hour because of a problem with the nose-wheel door – which Germanwings said had been resolved – and took off more than 25 minutes late from Barcelona for reasons that are not yet clear.

By 9.01, the Airbus was back in the air. All was normal for the next 40 minutes. The Airbus reached a cruising altitude of 38,000 feet at 9:45 in the skies over southern France. Then something went catastrophically wrong and the aircraft went into a steep and terminal descent. For the next eight minutes, the aircraft plunged to earth at a rate of 4000 feet a minute. No mayday signal was sent during the fall. The aircraft remained intact, automatically relaying its altitude, air speed and heading. At 9.47, air traffic controllers implemented an aircraft distress alert, based on its rapid loss of height. At 9.53, all contact was lost.

The reasons

It is not yet known what caused the plane to make a steady and rapid descent from 38,000 feet until it hit a mountainside in the Alps halfway through its 90-minute journey from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. It is known the plane's descent took eight minutes, which is longer than the average three or four minutes that would normally be expected in the case of a sudden midair upset, such as an aerodynamic stall.

Ms Bishop said it would be premature to speculate about the cause of the crash, but noted that Lufthansa was working on the assumption it was an accident.

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The recovery effort

After night fell in southern France on Tuesday, emergency services stopped helicopter flights to the crash site due to safety concerns but police said search teams would stay overnight at altitude. Rescue and crash investigation work would begin again at first light.

Australian consular officials would set up a mobile office in the French town of Gap, near the crash site, to help with the identification and recovery of bodies.

Air travel safety

The Airbus A320 is one of the world's most widely used aircraft, with a plane in the A320 family either taking off or landing every 2.5 seconds, Airbus data shows. But the short-haul, single-aisle A320 has also been at the centre of a dozen fatal accidents since 1988, including in December, when an AirAsia jet crashed into the Java Sea, killing 162 passengers and crew.

With the crash investigation just beginning, airline experts said the A320 was nonetheless an incredibly safe jet. For every million take-offs, the A320 family has 0.14 fatal accidents, a Boeing safety analysis found.

This News is republished from site http://www.smh.com.au/world/germanwings-plane-crash-what-we-know-so-far-20150325-1m7cwg.html