Families of the 150 victims of the Germanwings air crash have begun to arrive in the remote corner of the French Alps as investigators hunt for clues in Flight 9525's voice recorder.
The search continues for the flight data recorder after its casing was recovered but not its contents.
"One black box has already been found, it is being analysed but it is not easy, we need to be patient," said French president Francois Hollande in the remote town of Seyne-les-Alpes.
Leaders from Germany and Spain, which between them lost more than 100 citizens, flew over the crash site on Wednesday and met Mr Hollande for a private meeting with victims' families.
Treacherous ravines
German chancellor
Angela Merkel
thanked locals for opening their homes to grieving families and rescuers who face the task of recovering bodies from treacherous ravines around 100km north of Nice.
Dr Merkel said: “My thoughts are not just with the friends and families of victims but with the French people in this region who’ve given unprecedented help and shown their big hearts.”
The Airbus 320 left Barcelona on Tuesday at 10am and had reached maximum height three-quarters of an hour later before beginning an 18-minute descent. Attempts to contact crew failed and no emergency signal was sent. Investigators said the craft appears to have been intact on impact with the mountains, shattering the hull and scattering debris and bodies over a wide radius.
“It is very difficult to recover bodies,” said David Galiter, one of the leading gendarmes on site. “The operations will be done by aircraft only, by foot it is very difficult.”
France’s aviation security investigator BEA said it had been able to extract a “useable audio data file” from the plane’s recorder of pilot and air traffic control voices.
25 hours of data
“Detailed work will be carried on the file to understand interpret the voices and sounds that can be heard on the file,” said BEA investigator Remi Jouty. While he promised an analysis in “a matter of days”, the search continues for the recorder containing up to 25 hours of plane instrument data.
In the western German town of Haltern-am-See, mourning 16 students and two teachers, the school principal told parents the loss was “not something I’ll need twice in my life”.
"Someone asked me yesterday how many pupils are in my school," said headmaster Ulrich Wessel. "Instinctively I said 1,283, but it's 16 fewer than that."
A book of condolence will be opened today at 10.30am at the Mansion House in Dublin.
