Investigators were on Tuesday night preparing to examine a black box flight recorder recovered from a remote mountainside in the French Alps where a German airliner crashed, killing all 150 people on board.
The Airbus A320 jet operated by Germanwings, the budget airline owned by Lufthansa, was en route from Barcelona to Düsseldorf when it began to lose height rapidly, descending more than 30,000ft in eight minutes before crashing in the southern French Alps.
The French authorities launched a vast recovery operation, involving 600 gendarmes and 10 helicopters, but were hampered by the inaccessible terrain. The crash site, north east of Dignes-les-Bains in Haute Provence, is 7km from the nearest road and at an altitude of 1,600 metres.