The Consell de Ibiza have this afternoon issued a press release confirming a one-minute silence at 12 noon on Wednesday 25th March as a mark of respect for the victims of this morning’s air crash in the French Alps.
This report from theIndependant online.
All 144 passengers and six crew aboard the flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf – including a German schoolparty of 16 pupils and two teachers – are believed to have died when it crashed into the side of the 9,000 metre-high Estrop massif 100 miles north of Nice.
The regional newspaper La Provence quoted a local mountain guide as saying: “I took a dozen gendarmes up to the crash scene. From the Mariaud pass, I could see the wreckage. It was obvious to me that the plane had flown into the side of the mountain.”Sébastien Giroud, the owner of a saw-works in Prads-Haute-Bléones, said that he had glimpsed the plane for two or three seconds as it struggled over the village. “It was very low, only 1,500 or 2,000 metres and it seemed to be falling. I said to myself: ‘that’s not going to make it over the mountains. I never heard a thing.”
Flight 4U 9525 vanished from radar screens at about 10.47 am local time, 46 minutes after take-off from Barcelona. French officials said that debris had been found on the 2,961 metre-high Estrop massif near the small town of Barcelonette in the Alpes-de-Hautes-Provence.
French aviation officials denied earlier reports that the stricken aircraft had sent out a “mayday” signal. They said that it was French air traffic control which issued the distress signal when the plane disappeared from radar screens.
The French Prime Minister Maunel Valls, addressing parliament this afternoon, said: “no explanation for the crash can be excluded”Read the full article here http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germanwings-airbus-a320-plane-crash-eyewitnesses-recall-seeing-the-aircraft-skim-the-mountain-tops-it-came-down-10130457.html 
