An Airbus 320 flying from Barcelona, Spain, to Düsseldorf, Germany, crashed in the alps of southern France on Tuesday morning.
The Germanwings flight was carrying 144 passengers, along with six crew members. Officials are not expecting survivors.
"Everything is pulverized," Gilbert Sauvan, president of the general council of the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, told the Assocaired Press.
An owner of a nearby camping site told Al Jazeera that he heard the plane come down.
"The plane crashed just 2 kilometers [1.2 miles] from here, high on a mountain," Pierre Polizzi said. "There was loud noise and then suddenly nothing. At first I thought it came from fighter jets that often hold drills in the area."
German news outlet DW published this image of the crash site:
The plane dropped to a cruising altitude of just 5,000 feet from 38,000 feet in about 8 minutes.
"The aircraft's contact with French radar, French air traffic controllers ended at 10.53 am at an altitude of about 6,000 feet. The plane then crashed," Lufthansa unit Germanwings' Managing Director Thomas Winkelmann told a press conference.
The pilot of the plane had 10 years of experience of flying for Lufthansa, German officials said at a press conference. Officials said the plane had been last checked by technicians on Monday.
Weather conditions were reportedly good at the time of the crash.
Patrick Smith, an airline pilot and author of the book "Cockpit Confidential," told Business Insider that it's way too early to tell what happened to the plane.
"Everyone wants to come up with some sort of possible cause, and there’s no way to do that. It could be one of a thousand things," he said. "It takes a long time, sometimes years before we know for sure what happened."
Smith said nothing has jumped out at him so far that could point to a possible cause.
Polizzi, the camground owner, told the Associated Press: "The noise I heard was long — like 8 seconds — as if the plane was going more slowly than a military plane speed. There was another long noise after about 30 seconds."
Television news programs have been airing images of the area the plane went down in:France24
A local official told The New York Times that "an initial survey of the area by a helicopter showed that debris had been spread over five acres of a very craggy area."
Dozens of firefighters and police officers headed to the crash site, according to the French newspaper Le Monde, as well as French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve.
REUTERS/Jean-Paul PelissierFrench Police and Gendarmerie Alpine rescue units gather on a field as they prepare to reach the crash site of an Airbus A320, near Seyne-les-Alpes, in the French Alps, March 24, 2015.
French Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said the search and rescue operation will be long and extremely difficult because the area is so remote. It's thought to be inaccessible by land vehicles.
The flight crashed in the Digne region, which is about a half hour north of Marseille, Bloomberg reports. The area where the plane reportedly went down is mountainous, isolated, and rural.
The plane crashed about eight minutes after it started its descent, officials said.
Reuters
Bodies from the crash are being taken to an emergency morgue that has been set up in a nearby gym, according to a reporter for the Daily Mirror.
Sixteen students and two teachers from Germany are thought to have been on the plane, officials said at a press conference.
A full roster of passengers has not been released yet, but more than three dozen passengers are thought to be German and several are thought to be Spanish.
Debris from the aircraft has been found near the town of Prads-Haute-Bléone, The New York Times reports.
Here's what the region the plane crashed in looks like:
Alpes de Haute Provence/Wikimedia Commons (CC)
Flight 4U9525 was from the budget airline Germanwings, which is based in Cologne and was founded in 2002. It is wholly owned by Lufthansa.
The Airbus plane that crashed was 24 years old and has been with Lufthansa since 1991, according to Reuters.
Germanwings said in a statement that the plane that crashed had accumulated about 58,300 flight hours on 46,700 flights.
There have been several other major plane crashes in Europe during the past several years:
French President Francois Hollande tweeted a statement expressing solidarity with the families of the victims.
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