The authorities and executives of the airline, the budget carrier Germanwings, a subsidiary of Lufthansa, had no immediate explanation for the cause of the crash, which occurred just before 11 a.m. At a news conference Tuesday evening, Heike Birlenbach, the vice president of Lufthansa, said, “At this stage, we consider this to be an accident,” adding that everything else was speculation.
As night fell in the area, officials said they had recovered one of the jet’s so-called black boxes: the cockpit voice recorder, which captures up to two hours of the pilots’ conversations as well as other cockpit noises, including any alarms that would have sounded as the plane descended. A few hours later, they called off the search for the evening.
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