article_snippet: Airline: Germanwings (budget airline owned by Lufthansa)
article_snippet: Flight 9525 took off just after 10 a.m. Tuesday from Barcelona, Spain, for Dusseldorf, GermanyGermany, with 144 passengers -- among Dusseldorf, Germany two babies -- and six crew members.
article_snippet: Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann said Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann's believed 67 people, or nearly half those on the plane, are German citizens.
article_snippet: Sixteen students and two teachers from one German high school, called Joseph Koenig Gymnasium, were among those booked on Flight 9525, according to Florian Adamik, a municipal official in Haltern, the town where the school is located.
article_snippet: Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann confirmed the 16 students and two teachers were on the plane.
article_snippet: Germanwings started in 2002 and was taken over by Lufthansa seven years later as Lufthansa low-cost airline, handling an increasing number of midrange flights around Europe.
article_snippet: The captain of a plane had flown for Germanwings for more than 10 years, and had more than 6,000 flight hours on this model of Airbus.
article_snippet: a plane dates to 1991 and was last checked in Dusseldorf on Monday, according to Winkelmann.