SEYNE-LES-ALPES, France -- Crews began a second day of searching on an Alpine mountainside where a German jetliner crashed without making a distress call Tuesday, apparently killing all 150 people on board.
Helicopters resumed flights Wednesday over the field of widely scattered debris, hours ahead of the expected arrival of bereaved families and the French, German and Spanish leaders.
Crews were making their way slowly to the remote crash site through fresh snow and rain, threading their way to the rocky ravine. But CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips says the weather Wednesday was better than expected, bringing hopes that recovery efforts could speed along.
French Interior Ministry spokesman Paul-Henry Brandet said the overnight precipitation made the rocky ravine slippery, increasing the difficulty of reaching the steep area.
Phillips said retrieval of the victims would be the first priority for search crews, and it wasn't going to be easy. The plane came down in the most inhospitable, inaccessible terrain imaginable.
"Of course there are bodies," said Frédéric Petitjean, chief doctor at the local fire department, but he added that "identifying them will be hard... You see the state of the plane, so I'll let you imagine the state of the bodies."
On Tuesday, the cockpit voice recorder was retrieved from the site, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said.
"The black box is damaged and must be reconstituted in the coming hours in order to be useable," Cazeneuve told RTL radio.
Key to the investigation is what happened in the minutes after 10:30 a.m. local time on Tuewsday, said Segolene Royal, France's energy minister. From then, controllers were unable to make contact with the plane.
The two "black boxes" -- actually orange boxes designed to survive extreme heat and pressure -- should provide investigators with a second-by-second timeline of the plane's flight.
The voice recorder takes audio feeds from four microphones within the cockpit and records all the conversations between the pilots, air traffic controllers as well as any noises heard in the cockpit.
The flight data recorder, which Cazeneuve said had not been retrieved yet, captures 25 hours' worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane.
Royal and Cazeneuve both emphasized that terrorism was considered unlikely.
In Washington, the White House said American officials were in contact with their French, Spanish and German counterparts. "There is no indication of a nexus to terrorism at this time," said U.S. National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan.
Germanwings Flight 9525, from Barcelona, Spain to Duesseldorf, Germany, went into an unexplained eight-minute steep descent that culminated with the crash, but even as it descended, it maintained a relatively normal airspeed, adding to the mystery about what could have happened.
The Airbus A320 was less than an hour from its scheduled landing when it began the descent. France's aviation authority said the pilots did not send out a distress call and had lost radio contact with their control center.
The plane left Barcelona Airport at 10:01 a.m. and had reached its cruising height of 38,000 feet when it suddenly went into the unexplained descent to just over 6,000 feet, Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann told reporters in Cologne.
"We cannot say at the moment why our colleague went into the descent, and so quickly, and without previously consulting air traffic control," said Germanwings' director of flight operations, Stefan-Kenan Scheib.
The plane crashed at an altitude of about 6,550 feet at Meolans-Revels, near the popular ski resort of Pra Loup. The site is 430 miles south-southeast of Paris.
Germanwings is a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, Germany's biggest airline. The parent company is, for now, calling the crash an accident.
The majority of victims were European. Germany and Spain are believed to have lost the most lives in the crash. Britain's government confirmed Wednesday that three nationals were among those on board. Two of the passengers were Australian. The Japanese government says two of its citizens were on board as well. Two babies and two opera singers were on the plane.
While investigators searched through debris on steep and desolate slopes, families reeled with shock and grief. Sobbing relatives at both airports were led away by airport workers and crisis counselors.
"The site is a picture of horror. The grief of the families and friends is immeasurable," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said after being flown over the crash scene. "We must now stand together. We are united in our great grief."
It took investigators hours to reach the site Tuesday, led by mountain guides to the ravine in the southern French Alps, not far from the Italian border and the French Riviera.
Video shot from a helicopter and aired by BFM TV showed rescuers walking in the crevices of a rocky mountainside scattered with plane parts. Photos of the crash site showed white flecks of debris across a mountain and larger airplane body sections with windows. A helicopter crew that landed briefly in the area saw no signs of life, French officials said.
"Everything is pulverized. The largest pieces of debris are the size of a small car. No one can access the site from the ground," Gilbert Sauvan, president of the general council, Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, told The Associated Press.
"This is pretty much the worst thing you can imagine," said Bodo Klimpel, mayor of the German town of Haltern, filled with grief after losing the 16 students and their two teachers.
Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy were to visit the site Wednesday.
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