A German plane carrying at least 142 passengers and six crew members to Düsseldorf from Barcelona crashed on Tuesday in southern France, the French civil aviation authority confirmed.
The wreckage of the aircraft, an Airbus A320 operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, was located by a French military helicopter near the town of Prads-Haute-Bléone, according to Eric Héraud, a spokesman in Paris for the aviation authority, the Direction Générale de l’Aviation Civile.
The pilots declared an emergency at 10:47 a.m. and descended rapidly to around 5,000 feet from a cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, while flying over the town of Barcelonnette in the Alpes de Haute-Provence region, Mr. Héraud said.
President François Hollande of France said that many of the victims were German. “The conditions of the accident, which have not yet been clarified, suggest that there might not be any survivors,” he said.
Mr. Hollande said he would be in contact with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and King Felipe VI of Spain, who is visiting France on Tuesday. He said that all information would be shared with the German and Spanish authorities.
“We must feel grief because this is a tragedy that happened on our soil,” Mr. Hollande said. “I want to make sure that there have been no other consequences as the accident happened in a very difficult area to access, and I do not know yet if there were houses nearby. We will know in the next few hours. In the meantime, we must show support.”
A local official in the region, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly, said that an initial survey of the area by a helicopter showed that debris had been spread over five acres of a craggy area.
The German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said he could not comment about speculation regarding the presence of German victims.
“In these difficult hours, our thoughts are with all those who must fear that they have relatives among the passengers or crew,” he said, adding that he was “in the closest contact” with the French authorities.
