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