CRI听力:Germanwing's Airbus 320 Crash in France Kills 150

4U 9525 is a Germanwings flight.

This is a budget airline owned by German carrier Lufthansa.

144 passengers and 6 crew were on-board the aircraft when it went down in reportedly good weather above the French Alps, some 100 kilometers north of the French city of Nice.

There are no survivors.

The dead are mostly German and Spanish nationals, including 16 German students returning from an exchange trip.

Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann.

"The plane left this altitude again after one minute and entered a descent. This descent, according to our findings to this moment, lasted eight minutes in total. Contact between the airplane and French radar and French flight controllers were lost at 10:53 at a height of around six-thousand feet. The airplane then crashed."

The flight-data recorder of the downed jetliner has been recovered.

Officials say they remain unclear as to what may have caused the plane to go down.

The pilots didn't send a distress signal.

Heike Birlenbach is Lufthansa's Vice-president for Europe.

"For the time being we say it's an accident, there is nothing more that we can say right now. Everything else would be... speculation."

The crash site is located around 2-thousand meters above sea level in a remote mountain ravine.

French authorities are suggesting is may take days to recover the bodies because of the difficult terrain, snow and incoming storms.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has announced plans to travel to the crash site later on this Wednesday.

For CRI, I'm Qi Zhi.