16 STUDENTS ONBOARD

Sixteen German teenagers on a school exchange trip were feared to be among the 150 dead in the crash officials said. “There were 16 children and two teachers who had spent a week here, poor things. The children were aged about 15,“ Marti Pujol, mayor of the village of Llinars de Valles near Barcelona said.

ONE OF THE pilots of the Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps Tuesday morning was locked out of the cockpit as the plane went down, media reports France suggest.  Media reports that cited an investigator  with evidence from the recovered cockpit voice recorder, the pilots’ conversation early in the flight was natural, and eventually one stepped out of the cockpit, then couldn’t get back in.

“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer,” the investigator told the daily. “And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer.”

“You can hear he is trying to smash the door down,” he added.

It’s stunning evidence in the ongoing investigation into what caused the crash of Flight 9525 with 150 people on board. Authorities have recovered the two black boxes, an arduous task that required searching remote, mountainous terrain accessible only by air, but one of them, the flight data recorder, is so badly damaged that determining exactly what happened will be a difficult task.