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Parts left are the size of a small car. investigators did find a black box and say it s damaged, but should still be able to provide clues. 150 people were onboard and officials at the crash site say there are no signs of life. most of the victims were from europe including 16 german high school students. two babies were also onboard. the plane left barcelona at 10:00 a.m. local time yesterday morning, climbed to a cruising altitude of 38,000 feet within a half hour. minutes later the plane began an unexplained descent. officials say it fell thousands of feet per minute for roughly eight minutes. the pilots did not send a distress signal which was initially reported in the hour or so after the crash, and flight radar 24 says it lost contact with the plane, which plunged more than 30,000 feet by 10:40. took crews hows to reach the crash site because of its remote ....
Of witness evidence. we did speak to one man who lives in the last village before the accident site and what he describes is hearing this strange noise that he certainly never heard before from an aircraft and then nothing. no explosion. no sound of an accident until he realized the plane had, in fact gone down in the valley just next door to his village. keir, i m looking at the debris up and down very steep crevices and mountainsides. give us a sense of where you are standing and how brief the debris field is. reporter: yeah, they are talking about it being three courses of a pile wide. you can see behind me here this is mountainous. well we are actually sitting in a valley here surrounded by mountains on every side. in that direction. that is where this a-320 such as it is, it is high up what you have to do according to locals that we have spoken to if you want to get there by foot is to ....
Hearing and watching these helicopters behind me take off carrying air investigators are difficult to reach accident scene, mica what they are coming back with is are extraordinary stories about just how for one official described it as pulverized the plane is another official saying that he has never seen anything like it but in most cases of an air accident, you see the cockpit still are pretty much in shape. in this case he says there is just nothing, nothing that you can really recognize in any substantial spens sense and so that is going to make the investigation difficult. you mentioned the black fwhoox they have retrieved. that is now in paris. it has been damaged. reports say they think they can get clues from it. i think tom was mentioning there, they are urgently looking for that second black box, if they can find that. they are pretty robust. that should help them to try to establish what happens. by the way, just one little bit ....
Morning, michael, why is terrorism being ruled out so early? it shouldn t be ruled out, there is nothing to reveal if it s a terrorist or accident. let s go to your earlier segment and something tom alluded to. statistics may show it to be safe an airplane takes off or lands every two seconds, throw out the statistics. the high profile crashes that we have have people on edge and what has to happen is to make sure, a, there is no relationship between these crashes, certainly the ukrainian one is an anomaly out of that and, b, that there is nothing systemic across the a-320 or the boeing airplane. that s why it s trickal to get those black boxes. so terrorism or suicide where one of the crew intentionally brought the plane down. but, you know those probably aren t what happened. i tell you, it will be a unique set of things we may get 30% ....
At that point it can almost be too l.a. at 38,000 feet have you 15 to 30 seconds to get your oxygen on before you are unconscious. so if the crew had not reacted fast enough to put their masks on then you might have a scenario in which they were not conscious when this plane was on its programmed descent. that has people confused. why hasn t this plane made a programmed descent, it appears, a methodical rapid descent. not extreme. why did it make that programmed descent and then knew into a mountain? in the view of many that would adhere to the theory the crew at some point became incapacitated. gentleman stay with us. let s bring into the conversation france nbc news correspondent keir simmons with the latest on the scene. keir. reporter: mica, good morning. it s interesting hearing you guys talk about the investigation. because while i m listening to you talk about that all of the time it s extraordinary really ....