glide in the mountains, there s not a lot of wide fields to set down in. but it says to me it was still under control. but not powered. we re putting up a flight track again. that shows where the plane went. and it does seem do go out east over the iberian peninsula into the water is that i know you don t, you probably don t know this flight route intimately. should it have gone over the water to go from barcelona to dusseldorf germany? or is that something that s unexpected or a detour? well no you know most places and certainly in europe they still follow what s called the old highways in the sky. you know of course now with the gps and direct flight path management you can take a plane in the most direct route. and that is of course where worldwide aviation is going. but a lot of places you still fly the old highways through the sky. so one marker so it s not
went down near morearseille in the south of france. this was in the apparently in the middle of their flight path. they were going from dusen dofr to barcelona. the big question is whether or not they might have had some sort of in-flight incident that might have caused them to decrease altitude. i want to talk about the airline, it s one that i ve flown a lot in the past. because of course as you know i usually live in germany. it s a direct subsidiary of lufthansa. when i say that lufthansa in the past i would say year or so has outsourced pretty much of a all of its medium and short-haul flights from lufthansa itself into this company, germanwings. which has been operating for a while, but has gotten very very big over the past year. due to cost-cutting restructuring program, lufthansa has put most of their flights into germanwings. they have a good reputation in germany. the reason for that is all of the planes from germanwings are serviced by lufthansa tech nick.
question why two aircraft could have should have fallen out of the sky in what is traditionally, if you look at the last month s safety numbers, the cruise part of the flight is by far the safest part. so you re looking at just going to throw them out there, you re looking at structural failure. something dramatic happening to the aircraft. you re looking at all of those sort of incidents that could be involved. richard, we do understand that the french authorities must be getting information about what happened on this because they have confirmed that there was a distress call from this germanwings flight 9525 that was headed from barcelona to dusseldorf. it apparently did go down in france the provence the alps region the mid point, as you just pointed out, 95% of crashes are on either takeoff or landing. french authorities also saying fairly early on richard, that this coming from the french
hearing, which is a germanwings airliner has gone down in france. it was headed from spain, barcelona, to dusseldorf in germany, it s an a-320 like the one you re skieeing on your screen. that s the projected path of the flight. reports are that it went down 142 passengers on board. the point of intrigue right now in understanding this situation is that we are told by experts, mary sciavo and david soucie both of whom are on the phone that 95% of crashes happen on takeoff or landing. if the plane went down where it is reported it did in france. it would be in the mid point of its flight. fred pleitgen joins us from france. the french prime minister confirming there s been a crash. there was some reporting from reuters saying they were up to 142 passengers on this plane. two pilots and four cabin crew. and that apparently the plane
who are now tuning in if you are just joining us let us tell you what s happening, a germanwings air flight has gone down in the south of france flight number 9525 it had 142 passengers on board and six crew members. we understand that at 38,000 feet somewhere mid flight on its way from barcelona to dusseldorf something went wrong. a distress call went out and that airplane then lost altitude from 38,000 feet down to 24,000 feet in the space of about six seconds, although we don t know what distress call. it was several minutes, giving a rate of descent that mary sciavo has told us is not indicative of a full stall or something that would have made this craft break up in the air. french authorities, let s get to fred pleitgen in london. we re hearing confirmed information about several aspects. what are they saying? they have more information, chris, on the distress call