2 vital clues stand out after the unsolved Germanwings crash

A cockpit voice recorder badly damaged when a German jetliner smashed into an Alpine mountainside and a crucial two-minute span when the pilot lost contact are vital clues into what caused the plane to go down, killing all 150 people on board, officials said Wednesday.

French investigators cracked open the mangled black box of a German jetliner on Wednesday and sealed off the rugged Alpine crash site where 150 people died when their plane smashed into an Alpine mountainside.

The dented, twisted, and scarred cockpit voice recorder was being mined by investigators for clues into what sent the Germanwings Airbus 320 into a mid-flight dive Tuesday after pilots lost radio contact over the southern French Alps during a routine flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. Germany's top security official said Wednesday there was no evidence of foul play.

Investigators have been able to extract a usable audio recording from a black box recovered on the site, France's aviation security investigator BEA said.

"We just have been able to extract a useable audio data file," Remi Jouty told a news conference, adding that it was too early to draw any conclusions about the causes of the crash.

"Detailed work will be carried on the file to understand interpret the voices and sounds that can be heard on the file," he said, adding that he expected to have more analysis of the voices in "a matter of days."

Helicopters surveying the scattered debris lifted off at daybreak to eye the craggy ravine. Emergency crews, meanwhile, traveled slowly over the steep, rocky terrain to the remote high-altitude crash site through fresh snow and rain. Bereaved families and the French, German, and Spanish leaders were expected later Wednesday.

"The black box is damaged and must be reconstituted in the coming hours in order to be usable," French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve told RTL radio.

Here is the cockpit voice recorder recovered from the crash site:

Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses

The cockpit voice recorder from Germanwings plane that crashed in the French Alps.

Another view of the cockpit voice recorder:

Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses

For comparison:

Also key to the investigation is what happened in the two minutes of 10:30 a.m. and 10:31 a.m., said Segolene Royal, a top government minister whose portfolio includes transport. From then on, air traffic controllers were unable to make contact with the plane.

The voice recorder takes audio feeds from four microphones within the cockpit and records all the conversations between the pilots and air traffic controllers as well as any noises in the cockpit.

France's air accident investigation agency released images of the orange casing, mangled and scarred from the impact.

The flight data recorder, which Cazeneuve said has not yet been retrieved, captures 25 hours' worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane.

France's air force says it scrambled a Mirage fighter jet to the area when the flight lost radar contact, but it arrived too late to help.

German interior minister Thomas de Maiziere told reporters in Berlin on Wednesday that "according to the latest information there is no hard evidence that the crash was intentionally brought about by third parties." Royal and Cazeneuve each emphasized that terrorism was considered unlikely.

The crash left pieces of wreckage "so small and shiny they appear like patches of snow on the mountainside," said Pierre-Henry Brandet, the Interior Ministry spokesman, after flying over the debris field.

Investigators retrieving data from the recorder will focus first "on the human voices, the conversations," followed by the cockpit sounds, Transport Secretary Alain Vidalies told Europe 1 radio. He said the government planned to release information gleaned from the black box as soon as it could be verified.

Deborah Hersman, president and CEO of the National Safety Council and a former chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said generally voice recorder data could be downloaded in a matter of hours.

She told NBC's "Today" show that the data would offer insight into "those critical minutes and seconds leading up to the crash."

"I'm absolutely confident that the investigators are going to figure out what happened," she said.

Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann said the company was already in contact with families of 123 victims and trying to reach relatives of the remaining 27. He said victims included 72 German citizens, 35 Spanish, two people each from Australia, Argentina, Iran, Venezuela, and the US and one person each from Britain, the Netherlands, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Denmark, Belgium, and Israel. Some could have dual nationalities.

They included two babies, two opera singers, an Australian mother and son vacationing together, and 16 German high school students and their two teachers returning from an exchange program in Spain.

"Nothing will be the way it was at our school anymore," said Ulrich Wessel, the principal of Joseph Koenig High School in the German town of Haltern.

"I was asked yesterday how many students there are at the high school in Haltern, and I said 1,283 without thinking - then had to say afterward, unfortunately, 16 fewer since yesterday. And I find that so terrible," he added.

In the French town of Seyne-les-Alpes, locals offered to host bereaved families because of a shortage of rooms to rent.

The plane, operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, was less than an hour from landing in Düsseldorf when it unexpectedly went into a rapid eight-minute descent. The pilots sent out no distress call, France's aviation authority said.

Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr, himself a pilot, said he found the crash of a plane piloted by two experienced captains "inexplicable."

Former US National Transportation Safety Board chair Deborah Hersman said investigators should be able to "get the entirety" of the roughly two-hour flight from the recorder, if it isn't significantly damaged.

In an NBC "Today" show interview Wednesday, she said investigators needed insights into "those critical minutes and seconds leading up to the crash."

In Spain, flags flew at half-staff on government buildings and a minute of silence was held in government offices across the country. Parliament canceled its Wednesday session.

Barcelona's Liceu opera house held two minutes of silence at noon in homage to two German opera singers - Oleg Bryjak and Maria Radner - who took the flight after performing at the theater last weekend.

In an eerie coincidence, an Air France flight from Paris to Saigon crashed just a few kilometers (miles) from the same spot in the French Alps in 1953, killing all 42 people on board.

Associated Press reporting by Greg Keller and Lori Hinnant.