Germanwings Airbus A320 plane crashes in French Alps Tuesday March 24,2015

 

Germanwings Airbus A320 plane crashes in French Alps, all 148 aboard feared dead

 

An Airbus plane operated by Lufthansa's Germanwings budget airline crashed in southern France on Tuesday March 24,2015 en route from Barcelona to Duesseldorf

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said he understood between 142 and 150 people were on board and feared dead.

"The cause is at present unknown," he told reporters.

A spokesman for the DGAC aviation authority said the airplane crashed near the town of Barcelonnette about 100 km (65 miles) north of the French Riviera city of Nice.

Lufthansa's Germanwings unit said it was as yet unable to verify reports of the crash.

The crashed A320 is 24 years old and has been with the parent Lufthansa group since 1991 

 

The co-pilot of the doomed Germanwings Airbus A320 locked his captain out of the cockpit before deliberately crashing into a mountain to 'destroy the plane', it was sensationally revealed today Wednesday March 25,2015

French prosecutor Brice Robin gave further chilling details of the final ten minutes in the cockpit before the Airbus A320 plunged into the French Alps killing 150 people.

Revealing data extracted from the black box voice recorder, he said the co-pilot - named as 28-year-old German Andreas Günter Lubitz - locked his captain out after the senior officer left the cockpit.

At that point, Lubitz uses the flight monitoring system to put the plane into a descent - something that can only be done manually.

Mr Robin said: 'The intention was to destroy the plane. Death was instant. The plane hit the mountain at 700km per hour.

‘I don’t think that the passengers realised what was happening until the last moments because on the recording you only hear the screams in the final seconds’.