Summary

  • Search and recovery efforts on Wednesday 25 March in the French Alps, after a Germanwings plane crashed a day earlier with 150 people on board

  • Airbus 320 Flight 4U 9525 was travelling between Barcelona and Duesseldorf

  • The aircraft's black box voice recorder has been recovered and contains a 'usable audio file'

  • The casing of the second box - the flight data recorder - has been found, but not its contents

  • Memorial services being held as mourning for the victims begins

  • Among the dead are believed to be 72 German nationals and at least 51 Spaniards

  • Citizens of the UK, Australia, Japan, Israel, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Denmark, the Netherlands, the USA and Belgium were also on board

  • French President Francois Hollande, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy have visited the crash site

Live Reporting

Lauren Turner, Claire Brennan, Claudia Allen and Richard Irvine-Brown

  1. Spain has declared three days of mourning and will hold a minute of silence across the country at noon (11:00 GMT). Spanish King Felipe VI cut short his first state visit to France on Tuesday after hearing news of the tragedy.

  2. Wednesday morning at the Joseph-Konig-Gymnasium high school in Haltern am See in Germany. The school is mourning the loss of 16 classmates and two teachers who were on the plane.

    A police officer and a woman enter the Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium high school in Haltern am See (25 March, 2015)Reuters

  3. Germanwings will have to cancel more flights on Wednesday as some crew members decline to fly. "This is due to crew members, who decided not to operate aircraft today following the reports on the accident," a statement on the company's website says. "We understand their decision."

  4. Read more in this BBC report from 2014 about the differences between the two black boxes - the cockpit recorder and data recorder.

  5. French interior minister confirms that the cockpit voice recorder is damaged. The second black box, the flight data recorder, has yet to be found.

  6. Greig Friday, 29, from Melbourne, Australia, is one of those who died on the flight with his mother, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said.

    Greig Friday from Melbourne (Undated handout photo)AFP

  7. Two opera singers - Oleg Bryjak, 54 and Maria Radner, 34 - who had performed on stage in Barcelona were among those killed.

  8. The black box device recovered from the plane is the cockpit voice recorder, AFP has just reported. It is damaged and is being sent to Paris, sources close to the inquiry say.

  9. Debris of the jet could be seen on Tuesday scattered on the mountain side near Seyne-les-Alpes.

    Debris of the crashed Germanwings passenger jet could be seen on Tuesday scattered on the mountain side near Seyne les Alpes in the French AlpsAP

  10. It will take "at least a week" to search the remote site, police told AFP, and "at least several days" to repatriate the bodies. More than 300 policemen and 380 firefighters have been mobilised in addition to a squad of 30 mountain rescue police. Five investigators spent the night at the site.

  11. The BBC's James Reynolds, in nearby Seyne-les-Alpes, says that answers may begin to emerge on Wednesday about the causes of the crash. There was no distress call from the pilots during the eight minutes the plane took to descend into the mountainside - and our correspondent says that the black box flight recorder will be the starting point for investigators trying to determine what went wrong.

  12. Welcome to the BBC's live coverage as the search operation continues at the scene of Tuesday's Germanwings plane crash in the southern French Alps. All 150 people on board are feared dead.