By Hajer M'tiri
PARIS
The "black box" flight recorder from the Germanwings Airbus 320 which crashed into the French Alps on Tuesday with the suspected deaths of all 150 people on board has been recovered damaged but with information that can be extracted, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has said.
Cazeneuve said in Paris on Wednesday the cockpit voice recorder for flight 4U 9525 had been located, some data was retrievable and all possible causes for the disaster would be examined.
Cazeneuve told French radio RTL: "France's civil aviation safety organization BEA says the black box has been discovered damaged, but it is exploitable.
"The debris from the plane is spread over one-and-a-half hectares, which is a large area because the shock was significant, but it shows that the plane did not appear to have exploded."
A possible "terrorist attack" was "not a theory we are focusing on," Cazeneuve added.
- Babies among 'dead'
French Secretary of State for Transport Alain Vidal said one of the two data recorders from the aircraft, which are colored orange but referred to as "black boxes" had arrived on Wednesday morning at the office of the Bureau of Accident Investigations, or BEA, France's civil aviation safety organisation in the French capital.
He said: "When it comes to analyzing the sounds, it can take several weeks, but it is work that will perhaps give us an explanation."
The search for the flight data recorder was ongoing, he said.
Snow was hampering efforts on Wednesday by search-and-rescue workers to retrieve the bodies of the 144 passengers and six crew who were onboard the 24-year-old aircraft flown by the low-budget airline, a subsidiary of German carrier Lufthansa, which went down in southern France after losing height rapidly from its cruising height of 38,000 feet the day before.
A total of 45 Spaniards, 67 Germans including 16 schoolchildren and their two teachers, a passenger of Turkish origin and two babies are believed to have been among those who perished in the crash.
Other passengers were Belgian, British, Kazakhstani, Australian, Colombian and Argentine.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in Ankara another passenger named Yasmin could possibly be a Turkish citizen.
- Bad weather
Germanwings said it would cancel some of its flights on Wednesday amid reports by Der Spiegel that some pilots had refused to fly the Airbus 320 until investigations into the crash had been carried out.
"Some crew members did not wish to fly in the current situation, which we understand," a spokesman for the airline said on Wednesday.
German weekly Der Spiegel also reported on Tuesday the crashed aircraft had experienced a technical problem on its Nose Landing Door a day earlier and had to remain on the ground for hours.
Snow, rain and heavy winds were reported to be hitting the site of the crash at Meolans-Revels near the town of Barcelonnette, with bad weather forecast for the coming days which would hamper any rescue-and-recovery operations.
German authorities set up a crisis desk at Dusseldorf Airport to provide information and support to families and friends of the passengers.
A team of psychologists had been sent from France to Seyne-les-Alpes, close to the crash area, to support the families of victims arriving at the scene who were also expected to be met by French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
- Distress call
The aircraft crashed at 10:53 local time, 52 minutes after its departure from the Spanish city of Barcelona as it headed to Dusseldorf in Germany, according to Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann.
“According to the information we have for the time being, the aircraft reached to its regular cruising altitude at 10:45 and after a minute it has entered into a descent, which continued for eight minutes,” Winkelmann said.
French Secretary of State for Transport Alain Vidal said: "There was a distress call recorded at 10:47 ... (which) showed that the aircraft was at 5,000 feet, in an abnormal situation and the crash took place shortly after this signal."
Pierre-Henry Brandet, French Interior Ministry spokesperson, said that the plane crashed "in a mountainous area difficult to access, at 2,000 meters above sea level."
The French union of air traffic controllers, SNCTA, announced in a statement that it had suspended strikes planned for Wednesday, Thursday and Friday given the "dramatic circumstances."
- Tragic incidents
One of the reasons for the dispute was air traffic controllers' concerns over overloaded airspace.
The air disaster is one of the most tragic incidents in recent German aviation history and the first deadly crash of a Germanwings plane since the low-budget airline was founded by Germany’s largest airline in 2002.
A co-pilot and a passenger died when Lufthansa Airbus A320-200 overran a runway at an airport in Warsaw, Poland, in 1993. A total of 68 occupants survived.
The crash was also the first on French soil since July 25, 2000, when an Air France Concorde crashed into a hotel in Gonesse in the Val-d'Oise, shortly after taking off from Roissy-CDG airport, killing 13 German passengers and crew members, along with four others on the ground.
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