DPA
Paris
Some 80% of the debris from the crash of Germanwings flight 4U 9525, which crashed into a mountainside in the French Alps on March 24 killing all 150 people on board, has been cleared from the site, a spokesman for Lufthansa told DPA yesterday.
Recovery workers have toiled to clear and analyse the 34 tonnes of debris.
Lufthansa chief financial officer Simone Menne, visiting the site, told local authorities that the airline group that owns Germanwings would continue assist with clean-up efforts.
Airline workers are only collecting debris from the plane, the Lufthansa spokesman said, leaving anything that could belong to the victims for the French military police.
They expect to complete the process in 2-3 weeks.
Marseilles prosecutor Brice Robin said there is still no sign of a technical failure in the plane.
He is working on an earlier assessment that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz intentionally locked himself in the cockpit and steered the aircraft to its demise.
But Robin said he would refrain from adding to speculation about Lubitz’s possible motive as he waits for the findings of a parallel probe in Germany.
He added that French DNA technicians labouring to identify the victims expect to be finished with their task by the end of May.
A spokeswoman for the French aviation accident agency, BEA, told DPA that their concurrent security investigation is still synchronising data from two black boxes recovered from the crash site.
So far, the black boxes have provided the bulk of insight into the plane’s final moments – including Lubitz’s breathing indicating that he was conscious, the captain’s insistent banging on the cockpit door and Lubitz’s repeated acceleration of the plane as he manually changed its course to steer the plane into the mountainside.
German investigators have also revealed that Lubitz had medical records indicating he struggled with depression and suicidal tendencies, and that he had searched for suicide methods and cockpit locking mechanisms online during the week before the crash.