For a second day, rescuers will fan out over harsh terrain in a remote corner of the French Alps looking for the remains of 150 people killed when Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed without warning.
Conditions for recovery efforts Wednesday are not ideal, with wind and low cloud in the area.
Even without inclement weather, crews face an array of challenges in finding the remains of those on board: Near vertical mountain slopes. Tiny pieces of debris. Human remains strewn for hundreds of meters along a deep ravine.
It's also far from accessible. The plane crashed in an area known as the Massif des Trois-Eveches, near Digne-les-Bains, where mountain peaks soar almost as high as 3,000 meters (1.9 miles).
Helicopters took off Wednesday from Seyne-les-Alpes, the staging ground for search efforts. Officials say they need to fly helicopters to the crash site to allow teams to begin search and recovery efforts.
Merkel, Hollande and Rajoy arrived Wednesday afternoon at Seyne-les-Alpes to meet with rescue workers and thank them for their efforts.
The Marseille prosecutor, Brice Robin, said investigators were starting the grim task of identifying the bodies.
"I would like to stress that it will take several days," he said. "I am not even speaking of DNA comparisons, that will be carried out afterward and will take weeks. So I want to say right away that we are facing a lengthy investigation. We won't have the results immediately."
Perhaps the only task as challenging as recovering the bodies is figuring out why the plane went down with all 144 passengers and six crew members on board.
Germanwings employees held a moment of silence in Cologne, Germany, on Wednesday morning to mark the moment of the crash. A "small" number of flights were canceled due to reluctance among some crew members to fly, the airline said in a statement.
A moment's silence was also held in Barcelona, the Spanish city from which the plane took off, bound for Germany.
Germanwings plane crash: What we know so far
Strange factors in the crash
The crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 is bizarre for several reasons: There was no distress call. The aircraft crashed midflight, rather than at takeoff or landing like with most crashes. And the plane dropped from an altitude of 38,000 feet for eight minutes, the airline said.
Searchers have so far retrieved the cockpit voice recorder, one of the plane's two "black boxes," said Cazeneuve, the French interior minister. The device, which is designed to capture all sounds on a plane's flight deck, is damaged but not beyond use, he told French radio station RTL.
An official with the BEA, the French aviation investigative arm, told Daily News that it is working to open the external orange casing so that investigators can access the computer chips inside that hold critical information and data.
If there is no damage to those computer chips, investigators could access and download the data as soon as Wednesday. If there is damage, the process could take two to three days instead.
BEA investigators are currently mapping the debris field of the crash. They are not retrieving any pieces of the plane or wreckage at the moment besides the recorder while they identify where pieces landed, such as the cockpit, fuselage and engines.
The official said the plane's flight data recorder has not yet been located. The two devices are expected to be crucial in unraveling what led to the crash. Investigators typically spend months analyzing the recorders' data.
Aviation expert Geoffrey Thomas, editor-in-chief of AirlineRatings.com, told Daily News that the cockpit voice recorder is particularly important, "because we need to know what was going on (in) the cockpit and the challenges facing the pilots. ... This will tell us a lot about what went wrong."
Speaking after a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Cazeneuve told BFMTV: "We cannot completely rule out terrorism, but it is not considered the most likely explanation at the moment. We need to let the investigation do its work."
The final moments of flight
One piece of information is already clear: There was no distress call from the cockpit, the French Civil Aviation Authority said.
Why would a pilot not alert someone that there is an emergency? It might sound counterintuitive, but calling for help is not the first thing on a pilot's checklist when things go wrong.
Aviation analyst David Soucie said the first concern is to fly the plane, and secondly, to find the safest option for a crash landing, if it comes to that.
The Germanwings pilot "was definitely aviating and navigating from what we can tell," Soucie said. The pilot was conceivably looking for a place to try to land, he said.
Flight 9525 was headed from Barcelona, Spain, for Dusseldorf, Germany.
According to Germanwings, the plane reached its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, and then dropped for eight minutes. The plane lost contact with French radar at a height of about 6,000 feet. Then it crashed.
Slightly different timelines have emerged for the aircraft's final minutes. According to Germanwings, the plane started to descend without authorization at 10:45 a.m. (5:45 a.m. ET) and lost contact with French radar at 10:53 a.m., at a height of about 6,000 feet.
A spokesman for the French national police force told Daily News the plane started to descend without authorization at 10:31 a.m. and that four minutes later air traffic controllers sent out a warning. The plane was registered at 2,000 meters (6,560 feet) but then disappeared from radar, he said.
"We heard a strange noise, and at first we thought it was an avalanche," said Sandrine Boisse, president of the tourism office at the Pra Loup ski resort said. "Something was wrong. ... We didn't know what."
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called the scene "a picture of horror" after flying over the area Tuesday.
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