A German wings A320 crashed in the French Alps Tuesday morning with 142 passengers on board.
The plane crash in the French Alps was confirmed by General Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGCA). The jet crashed in the Upper Bléone Valley, Le Provence wrote. Emergency services are currently heading to the disaster zone.
France's Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve has confirmed the plane crash and is headed to the scene, local TV reported. He added that debris from the crashed jet has been found near a village. He added that debris from crashed jet has been found near the small town of Barcelonnette, a commune in Alpes-de-Haute-Provence.
The owner of a camp site in the French Alps near the scene of the crash says he heard a series of loud noises coming from the air before the Germanwings A320 Airbus crashed. Pierre Polizzi told AP the noise began at 11:30 local time.
"There are often fighter jets flying over, so I thought it sounded just like that. I looked outside but I couldn't see any fighter planes."
"The noise I heard was long - like 8 seconds - as if the plane was going more slowly than a military plane speed. There was another long noise about 30 seconds later."
The route taken by the German wings plane
Comment: What the eyewitness is saying, essentially, is that he heard two "sonic boom" type noises, 30 seconds apart. But there were no jets in the area at the time. This data puts this tragedy squarely in the domain of an overhead meteorite explosion.