Germany: Students at the main high school in the western German town of Haltern are gathering by an ever-growing memorial of candles and flowers, weeping and hugging as they mourn the loss of 16 classmates and two teachers who died in the crash of a Germanwings flight in the French Alps.
Fourteen-year-old Lara Beer told The Associated Press Wednesday her best friend, Paula, was aboard the aircraft.
Wiping tears from her eyes, she said "I was waiting for the train that Paula was supposed to be on but the train came and Paula wasn't on it, so I went back home and that's when my parents told me Paula was dead."
Read: Germanwings crash: Black box found, investigators to sift through wreckage
School classes have been canceled but students are being encouraged to come in to talk with counselors and friends.
A black box recovered from the scene and pulverized pieces of debris strewn across Alpine mountainsides held clues to what caused a German jetliner to take an unexplained eight-minute dive Tuesday midway through a flight from Spain to Germany, apparently killing all 150 people on board.
French investigators will sift through the wreckage today for clues into why a German Airbus ploughed into an Alpine mountainside, killing all 150 people on board including 16 schoolchildren returning from an exchange trip to Spain.
The A320 jet operated by Lufthansa's Germanwings budget airline was obliterated when it went down in a rugged area of ravines on Tuesday while flying over France en route to Duesseldorf from Barcelona.
No distress call was received from the aircraft, but France said one of the two "black box" flight recorders had been recovered from the site 2,000 metres above sea level.
A person familiar with the recovery effort told Reuters that this was the cockpit voice recorder. Investigators will also need the other black box which records flight data, information that is essential for probing air accidents.
Civil aviation investigators from France's Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses (BEA) are expected to hold a news conference on Wednesday afternoon.
The victims included two babies, two opera singers and 16 German high school students and their teachers returning from an exchange trip to Spain. It was the deadliest crash in France in decades.
The Airbus A320 operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, was less than an hour from landing in Duesseldorf on a flight from Barcelona when it unexpectedly went into a rapid descent. The pilots sent out no distress call and had lost radio contact with their control center, France's aviation authority said, deepening the mystery.
While investigators searched through debris from Flight 9525 on steep and desolate slopes, families across Europe reeled with shock and grief. Sobbing relatives at both airports were led away by airport workers and crisis counselors.
"The site is a picture of horror. The grief of the families and friends is immeasurable," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said after being flown over the crash scene. "We must now stand together. We are united in our great grief."
