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Rescuers struggle to recover bodies in French Alps crash

Opera singers Oleg Bryjak, 54, and Maria Radner, 33, were also on board, flying to their home city of Duesseldorf. Radner was travelling with her husband and baby, one of two infants on board the plane.

– Working on assumption of ‘accident’ –

Budget airline Germanwings said the Airbus, travelling from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, plunged for eight minutes but the crew made no distress call before crashing near the ski resort of Barcelonnette.

The rapid descent was “unexplained”, Marseilles prosecutor Brice Robin said.

One of the plane’s black boxes has been found, but it was unclear whether it was the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder. Investigators will continue searching for the second black box Wednesday.

Weather did not appear to be a factor in the crash, with conditions calm at the time, French weather officials said.

Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, said it was working on the assumption the crash was an “accident”.

“Anything else would be speculation,” Lufthansa vice president Heike Birlenbach told reporters in Barcelona.

She said the 24-year-old Airbus A320 had undergone its last routine check on Monday.

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Germanwings executive Thomas Winkelmann said the pilot had “more than 10 years of experience” and some 6,000 flying hours on an Airbus jet under his belt.

It was the first fatal accident in the history of Germanwings, and the deadliest on the French mainland since 1974 when a Turkish Airlines plane crashed, killing 346 people.

– ‘Ground access is horrible’ –

Locals described the difficult terrain that awaited rescue teams.

“Ground access is horrible … it’s a very high mountainous area, very steep and it’s terrible to get there except from the air during winter,” local resident Francoise Pie said.

Another local official, Gilbert Sauvan, told AFP: “The only possible access was by helicopter and people had to be winched down because the choppers couldn’t land.”

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