High school group among victims of German plane crash

UPDATE: A German official has confirmed a group of high school students traveling home from a week-long exchange trip in Spain was aboard the Germanwings plane that crashed this morning.

Administrators from the school the students visited said the 16 youth were from the German town of Haltern. The German school refused to comment.

French police are waiting on confirmation that the students were on board, but North Rhine-Westphalia state Education Minister Sylvia Loerhmann said officials “know that the school group boarded the plane,” the dpa news agency reported.

Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence officials said there is no indication the crash was a result of terrorism.

UPDATE (11:10 a.m. EDT): A helicopter has landed near the wreckage of a Germanwings plane in the French Alps, confirming there were no survivors of the crash earlier today. A local official told Les Echos newspaper that the plane disintegrated, and the largest debris was the size of a car.

Friends and relatives of the 150 people on board the flight are gathering at airports in Barcelona, Spain, and Dusseldorf, Germany, to get more information about the crash. German Chancellor Angela Merkel plans Wednesday to head to mountainside where the plane went down.

Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann said the plane began descending shortly after it reached its cruising height following takeoff from Barcelona Airport. The descent lasted eight minutes, he told reporters in Cologne, France. Radar and air traffic control contact broke off at 10:53 a.m.

OUR EARLIER REPORT (7:56 a.m. EDT): A Germanwings passenger jet with 150 people on board crashed this morning in the French Alps. Search teams located wreckage at about 6,550 feet and say they do not expect to find any survivors.

The Airbus A320, traveling from Barcelona to Duesseldorf, sent out a distress signal at about 10:45 a.m. local time and then crashed into a mountainous zone near the popular ski resort of Pra Loup.

Because of the area’s remote and rugged terrain, official said they expect the recovery of bodies and wreckage to be “extremely long and extremely difficult.”

Although the investigation into what happened is in the early stages, it does not appear weather played a role in the accident. The cloud ceiling wasn’t low, and the air did not appear to be turbulent, Capt. Benoit Zeisser of the Digne-le-Bains police told French network iTele.

Most of the passengers likely are German. The low-cost carrier Germanwings is a unit of Lufthansa.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.