Investigators have warned that incomplete flight data and treacherous mountain conditions mean it could be weeks or even months before they know why a Germanwings plane crashed into the French Alps on Tuesday.
As technicians assembled the first battered pieces of their tragic puzzle, there is only one certainty surrounding the end of flight 9525. Judging by the radar signals and trail of debris, the Airbus 320 was “flying to the end” when it slammed into the Alps with 150 people on board around 11am on Tuesday.
“It is far too early to make even the slightest guesses at what happened,” said Remi Jouty, the lead French investigator.
Further answers rely on solving three riddles: why did the plane crash mid-flight rather than the more dangerous time of take-off or landing? Why did it descend for 18 minutes before the crash? And why was there no distress call or signal from the pilots?
Four complicating factors – human error, technical failure, weather, terrorism – could play a role, singly or combined.
One French investigator pointed to a similar case a decade ago when a Cypriot plane crashed near Athens after a loss of cabin pressure knocked out the crew and passengers.
A subsequent investigation revealed that the crash was caused by technical problems ignored during repairs, something Lufthansa insisted was not the case with its Germanwings plane.
It said problems in the fated plane earlier this week were repaired fully before it carried out its routine Düsseldorf-Barcelona return run on Tuesday.
Radio silence
Another theory, that the radio silence was intentional and not due to incapacitation, has yet to be ruled out.
Germanwings published a preliminary passenger list yesterday indicating that 72 German nationals and 35 Spanish nationals lost their lives.
There were two victims each from the US, Australia, Iran, Venezuela and Argentina. One victim each came from the UK, the Netherlands, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Denmark, Belgium and Israel. Germanwings boss Thomas Winkelmann said the full list was not yet clear because several passengers had dual citizenship.
The airline has organised two flights today to bring relatives of the dead and grief counsellors from Düsseldorf and Barcelona. Though Germanwings declined to identify victims, names began to emerge from other sources yesterday.
The Washington Post named the two US victims as Yvonne Selke and her daughter Emily Selke from Virginia.
The British foreign office said it counted British victims among the dead, including two men, aged 28 and 59, as well as a 37-year-old Spanish-born woman and her seven- month-old baby boy, who had travelled to Spain for a funeral.
Madrid said it had lost at least 51 nationals, including newlyweds Asmae Ouahhoud el Allaoui (23) and Francisco Javier Gonalons (42). They had married on Saturday in the small town of La Llagosta and were reportedly planning to start a new life together in Düsseldorf.
In another case, three generations of women in one Spanish family were killed.
The mayor of the Catalonian town of Llinars del Valles, which hosted 16 German exchange students killed in the crash, said that another group of students from the same German town, but a different school, returned home yesterday – many travelling by rail rather than by air.
Germany's Bild tabloid published a class picture of the 16 dead students with pixelated faces in six pages of coverage, concluding with an all-black last page in "memory of the victims".
About 40 Germanwings flights were carried by Lufthansa and rival airlines yesterday. Germanwings executives said staff had declined to fly not for safety but personal reasons, and to attend an emotional vigil outside the firm’s Cologne headquarters yesterday.
“We have full understanding, we’re a small family,” said Mr Winkelmann. “Everyone knows everybody, and the shock is great, in minds and in the flight cabins.”
