Paris: Struck by tragedy, Germanways and Lufthansa changed their social media logos to black on Tuesday after an airliner crashed near a ski resort in the French Alps that killed all 150 people on board.
This has been the worst plane disaster in mainland France in four decades.
France's junior transport minister said there were "no survivors" from the crash of the Germanwings Airbus A320, a low-cost subsidiary of Lufthansa, in a remote part of the Alps that is extremely difficult to access.
Civil aviation authorities said they lost contact with the plane, which was carrying 144 passengers and six crew, and declared it was in distress at 10:30 am. "The distress signal showed the plane was at 5,000 feet in an abnormal situation," said Alain Vidalies, minister of state for transport.
Black logo of Germanwings on Twitter
French President Francois Hollande said the plane crashed in an area very difficult to access and rescuers would not be able to reach the site for several hours. "I want to express all our solidarity to the families affected by this tragedy," Hollande told reporters.
The plane was travelling from the Spanish coastal city of Barcelona to the German city of Duesseldorf when it went down in the ski resort area of Barcelonnette. A witness who was skiing near the crash site told a French television channel he "heard an enormous noise" around the time of the disaster.
The toll-free number 0800 11 33 55 77 (900 808 890 from Spain) is available to all the families of the passengers involved for assistance.
The plane belonged to Germanwings, a low-cost affiliate of German airline Lufthansa based in Cologne, which until now had no record of fatal accidents. France's leading air traffic controller union SNCTA has called off a strike planned from tomorrow to Friday. "We are suspending our planned strike as a result of the emotions created in the control rooms by the crash, particularly in Aix-en-Provence," the union's spokesman Roger Rousseau told AFP.
Black logo of Lufthansa on Twitter
In July 2000, an Air France Concorde crashed shortly after take-off from Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport en route for New York, leaving 113 people, mainly Germans dead and eventually leading to the supersonic airliner being taken out of service.
The world's worst air disasters remain the March 27, 1977, collision of two Boeing 747s on the runway at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, killing 583 people, and the August 12, 1985 crash into a mountainside of a Boeing 747 belonging to Japan Airlines, killing 520 people.
