parts left are the size of a small car. investigators did find a black box and say it s damaged, but should still be able to provide clues. 150 people were onboard and officials at the crash site say there are no signs of life. most of the victims were from europe including 16 german high school students. two babies were also onboard. the plane left barcelona at 10:00 a.m. local time yesterday morning, climbed to a cruising altitude of 38,000 feet within a half hour. minutes later the plane began an unexplained descent. officials say it fell thousands of feet per minute for roughly eight minutes. the pilots did not send a distress signal which was initially reported in the hour or so after the crash, and flight radar 24 says it lost contact with the plane, which plunged more than 30,000 feet by 10:40. took crews hows to reach the crash site because of its remote
things in and out. i think it was premature if there was any intentional event that was taking place, they may have misspoken until they find that information off the vcr. i agree, it is too early to rule anything in or out. there are none of the obvious signs of terrorism here in this plane. it doesn t appear the plane exploded in midair there was some kind of bomb on it. it would not have had the descent it had. it appeared somebody or some thing was in control of this plane as it mulligan its descent. it was a controlled descent. that s where i think there is a possibility where you can t rule it out. am i wrong? you can t rule anything out at this moment. you can t rule anything out at this moment. i am giving you the sign posts. remember that in the post-9-11 world, pilots are trained not to open that cabin for anything.
you know we are looking a lot at the plane, itself the a-320 jet model first entered service in 1988. just days ago, the company christened its 9,000th jet and delivered about 600 a year to carriers world wide. the companies says there are more than 3,000 of that model in use. the entire fleet has logged about 150 million flight hours. more than 85 million flights. airbus maintains that the number of fatal commercial flights has remained stable. while the number of overall flights and passengers have skyrocketed. in its 2013 report airbus claims six fatal accidents translateing into a rate of less than 1 per million flights, jean. right. so it s safe but something like this happens and, of course it gets everybody s attention in a tragic way. a question for greg what are they, what specific things are they going to be looking for in the flight data recorder data?
flight 17 was shot down over war torn ukraine killing all 298 people on board also a boeing 777 t. plane was flying from amsterdam to kuala lumpur. less than a week later, a transasia flight off western taiwan went down in extreme weather killing 48. the next day, 116 people were killed in a crash in mali. a several storm was blamed for airasia flight 8101 which plunged into the ja sa sea killing passengers and crew. like the aircraft that crashed yesterday in france it was an airbus a-320 and 38 people died last month when a transasia flight plunged into a river in taiwan. that crash was captured on dash-cam video. despite a series of high profile crashes, the world s airline safety record is actually improving. according to international air
side of a mountain from where he lives. nbc s keir simmons, thank you. and as keir was saying the investigation is now under way to determine what exactly caused this crash. for that let s bring in nbc s tom costello. tom, what are the most pressing questions at this point? reporter: yeah. hi mika. good morning. this morning still just as many questions as we had yesterday but i think the key questions as relates to the investigation really are, what did this plane descend rather rapidly, a controlled descent, programmed ascent why did it descend rapid rapidly from 30,000 do to 6,000 feet and why did the crew members not talk at all to air traffic control? the disaster stirring over the french alps may have started at our knee 38,000 feet. the plane spent one to three minutes at that altitude before beginning what appears to be a program descend, 4,000 feet per minute. unusually steep but not extreme.