French investigators cracked open a mangled black box and extracted audio from its cockpit voice recorder today, but gleaned no explanation for why a German plane dropped unexpectedly and smashed into a rugged Alpine mountain, killing all 150 on board.
The orange cockpit voice recorder, dented, twisted and scarred by the impact, is considered the key to knowing why the pilots of Germanwings Flight 9525 lost radio contact with air traffic controllers over the French Alps then crashed yesterday during a routine flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf.
French officials said terrorism appeared unlikely, and Germany's top security official said today there was no evidence of foul play.
Remi Jouty, director of the French aviation investigative agency, said an audio file was recovered this afternoon, including sounds and voices. But he said it was too early to draw any conclusions from the recorder, which takes audio feeds from four microphones in the cockpit and records all the conversations between the pilots, air traffic controllers as well as any noises.
Jouty said the plane was flying "until the end" and was at 6,000 feet (1,820 meters) when it smashed into the mountainside, well below its previous cruising altitude of 38,000 feet.
He said the final communication from the plane was a routine message about permission to continue on its route. He would not speculate on possible causes of the crash or rule anything out.
French President Francois Hollande, meanwhile, said the case for the plane's second black box had been found but not its contents. Jouty refused to confirm that about the flight data recorder, which captures 25 hours' worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane.
"At this moment people are on the scene still searching," Hollande said, speaking alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy in Seynes-les-Alpes, the town nearest to the crash site. Most of the plane's victims were German and Spanish.
"This is a true tragedy, and the visit here has shown us that," Merkel said.
Hollande promised that French investigators would do everything to determine the crash's cause.
Helicopters surveying the plane's scattered debris lifted off at daybreak for a look at the craggy ravine while emergency crews hiked through snow and rain over the steep, rocky terrain to the high-altitude crash site. In all, more than 600 rescue workers and aviation investigators were in the area, French officials said.
