First pictures of victims of Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 emerge as search planes find jet's remains scattered over Alpine mountainside

Victims: Leading opera singers Maria Radner (left) and Oleg Bryjak (right) were among the passengers who lost their lives in the crash

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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 said it was thought that 63 of the passengers on board were Germans, while reports from Spain suggest that around 45 Spaniards may have been on the flight. 

Two leading opera singers, Contralto 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.  

Mr Winkelmann said the captain on board was experienced and been with the airline and with Germanwings' parent company Lufthansa for more than 10 years and had clocked up 6,000 flying hours on this particular Airbus model.

He said the plane had had a normal service at Dusseldorf yesterday and its last major check-up had been in the summer of 2013.

He added that teams from Germanwings were in Dusseldorf with the families of those on board and that Lufthansa and Germanwings' technical staff were on their way to the crash site to assist with the investigation

Source:DailyMail