article_snippet: Helicopter crews found the airliner in pieces, none of Helicopter crews bigger than a small car, and human remains strewn for several hundred meters, according to Gilbert Sauvan, a high-level official in the Alpes de Haute Provence region who is being briefed on the operation.
article_snippet: One of the aircraft's data recorders, the so-called black boxes, has been found, according to French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, but it was too early to tell what it would say about the crash.
article_snippet: We don't know much about the flight and the crash yet," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.
article_snippet: Germanwings crash: Who was on the plane?
article_snippet: The valley where the plane went down is long and snow-covered, and access is difficult, said the mayor of the nearby town of Barcelonnette, Pierre Martin-Charpenel.
article_snippet: A mountain guide who heard a plane fly at alarmingly low altitude shortly before the crash, Michel Suhubiette, said helicopters may be the only way to get to the crash site.
article_snippet: According to Germanwings, a plane reached a plane cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, and then dropped for eight minutes.
article_snippet: a plane lost contact with French radar at a height of approximately 6,000 feet.
article_snippet: Then a plane crashed.
highlights_snippet: The plane reached 38,000 feet, and then dropped for eight minutes, Germanwings says .
  
highlights_snippet: One data recorder found from Germanwings plane that crashed in Alps .