Victims: Leading opera singers Maria Radner (left) and Oleg Bryjak (right) were among the passengers who lost their lives in the crash''
Pieces of debris, including what appear to be parts of the aircraft's orange and red tail and a wheel, are seen on the slopes of the crash site''
Two leading opera singers have been named as two of the 144 passengers who lost their lives when Germanwings Flight 9525 ploughed into an Alpine mountainside at more than 400mph.
Pictures of contralto Maria Radner and bass baritone Oleg Bryjak, from Kazakhstan, emerged hours after rescue helicopters arrived at the remote crash site to find wreckage from the obliterated plane scattered across hundreds of metres, with no pieces of debris larger than a small car.
Christian Vigne, a member of the first helicopter crew to arrive at the scene said the plane had 'completely disintegrated' and added bodies were 'strewn over an area of some 400 square metres'.
One of the plane's black box recorders, which could hold the key to what happened in the moments before the crash, has been found and will be examined immediately, France's interior minister said.
Sixteen German schoolchildren from the same class, six crew and two babies, including Ms Radner's young child, also died when the Airbus A320 crashed in a remote region of the French Alps en route from Spain to Germany.
Marina Bandres Lopez-Belio, a 37-year-old Spanish woman believed to be living in Manchester, and an unnamed father of four are also understood to be among the victims.
Images of the crash site emerged as confusion reigned over the final minutes of the doomed Airbus A320 after air traffic controllers claimed they received no SOS despite the jet nosediving 32,000ft in just eight minutes.
Disaster: A rescue helicopter flies over wreckage of a Germanwings Airbus A320 plane that crashed between the towns of Barcelonnette and Digne in the French Alps. All 150 people on board - including two babies and 16 children from the same German school - died in the crash''
The distinctive colours of the Germanwings plane are seen in this close-up photo of a piece of debris on the Alpine slopes''
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| JUST SAY ''AMEN''' RUWA MANGI''WHY ? SO SAD'' |
Obliterated: Debris reportedly from the Airbus A320 is seen on the mountainside. Mystery surrounds the final moments of the plassenger plane after air traffic controllers claimed they received no SOS signal despite the jet nosediving 32,000ft in just eight minutes''
Destroyed: Crews in the first helicopter to reach the site said they had seen no survivors and reported finding chunks of plane the size of a car''
About 150 firefighters and mountain police are being deployed to the scene, although officials warn it could take days to retrieve any bodies''
Windows from the Airbus A320, a model of plane known as the 'workhorse of the skies', are clearly visible on this piece of debris ''
Photographs taken of the scene this evening show what appears to be sections of charred aircraft on the mountainside''
Part of the writing on the fuselage of the plane is visible on a piece of the wreckage (centre) on the mountainside'
Four members of the search team are seen making their way to the crash site. The operation has now been called off for the night''
Views of the crash site show a handful of rescue workers starting their work among pieces of debris scattered across the mountainside
Charred pieces of wreckage continue to burn on the mountainside alongside smaller pieces of debris''
Parts of the plane, none larger than a small car, are pictured on the side of the mountain where the Airbus A320 crashed today''
Earlier reports quoted aviation sources in France as saying the pilots issued a Mayday distress signal and requested an emergency descent minutes before it hit the ground.
However, civil aviation authorities later denied that air traffic controllers received any such call.
'The aircraft did not itself make a distress call, but it was the combination of the loss of radio contact and the aircraft's descent which led the controller to implement the distress phase,' a spokesman for the French civil aviation authority said.
Germanwings chief executive Thomas Winkelmann said the aircraft began descending at 10.45am, a minute after reaching cruising height of 38,000ft.
This descent lasted eight minutes, he told reporters in Cologne. Radar and air traffic control contact broke off at 10.53am when it is understood to have crashed at more than 400mph.
Germanwings said it was thought that 63 of the passengers on board were Germans, while reports from Spain suggest that around 47 Spaniards may have been on the flight.
Officials at Barcelona's El Prat airport, where the plane took off from, said relatives of the dead had also identified two Argentinians, an American, a Colombian, a Mexican, a Belgian, a Moroccan national and seven Germans as being on the flight.
Two leading opera singers, Maria Radner and Oleg Bryjak from Kazakhstan, were among those who lost their lives in the crash.
Ms Radner, who performed all over the world including the Metropolitan Opera in New York and theatres in Milan and Buenos Aires, was on the plane with her husband and baby. She had just finished performing in the Richard Wagner opera Siegfried at Barcelona’s Liceu.
It was also reported that Marina Bandres Lopez-Belio, from the Pyrenees city of Jaca in Huesca, was travelling with her seven month-old baby and Polish husband. A local newspaper reported the 37-year-old lived in Manchester but had returned to Spain for her uncle's funeral.
Sources close to the Spaniard said she had decided to return via Germany after being unable to get a direct flight.
Two Australians were among those who died. They were a Victorian mother and her adult son, Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said. Officials are now seeking to confirm whether there were any other Australians or dual citizens on board.
A schoolgirl, her mother and grandmother, and an unnamed father of four, are also understood to have died in the crash.
The search of the plane crash site was called off for the night after conditions became too difficult and will resume tomorrow morning, French authorities said. Ten French police officers will guard the site overnight.
AIRBUS A320: THE WORKHORSE OF THE SKIES
The Airbus A320 - the model of aircraft involved in today's accident - is known as 'the workhorse of the skies' and is used by British Airways and a number of popular budget airlines.
Since the first version of the Airbus A320 was released in 1987, around 4,000 have been built and the company say one takes off or lands somewhere in the world every 2.5 seconds.
The short-haul, narrow-body airliner is assembled in France, Germany and China and was ranked as the world's fastest selling aircraft bewteen 2005 and 2007 when it became popular with low-cost airlines.
This Germanwings Airbus A320 carrying 144 passengers and six crew has crashed in the French Alps
And the single-aisle aircraft, which typically seats around 150 passengers, 'sets industry standards for comfort and operating economy on short- to medium-haul routes', according to Airbus.
Despite the Airbus A320 having one of the best safety records in the world, the widely-used family of aircraft have been involved in a number of crashes in the three decades they have been used, resulting in scores of deaths.
One the first accidents to involve one of the planes happened in the north east of France, not far from the current crash site, when an Air Inter flight came down in the Vosges mountains in 1992.
The single-aisle aircraft, which typically seats around 150 passengers, 'sets industry standards for comfort and operating economy on short- to medium-haul routes', according to Airbus. Above, file photo of inside an A320 aircraft
The Airbus A320-111 was on its approach to Strasbourg airport when it hit La Bloss Mountain, killing 87 of the 96 people on board.
The best-known recent incident involving the plane was when a domestic flight in the US had to put down in the Hudson River in New York.
The US Airways flight from the city's LaGuardia Airport heading for Charlotte, North Carolina when it is believed to have flown into a flock of geese.
One of the deadliest accidents involving one of the planes was in May 2006, when Armavia flight 967 crashed into the sea near Sochi, Russia.
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