Investigators have retrieved cockpit voice recordings from one of the black boxes of the German Airbus plane that smashed into the Alps, killing everyone onboard, and they expect a preliminary read-out of their content in days, an official said on Wednesday.
The development came as French President Francois Hollande, Germany's Angela Merkel and Spain's Mariano Rajoy traveled to the crash site in a remote French Alpine region to pay tribute to the 150 victims, mostly German and Spanish.
However, while Hollande promised that authorities would not rest until the causes of the crash were known, France's BEA air incident investigation bureau said it was still far too early to draw meaningful conclusions on why the plane, operated by the Germanwings budget arm of Lufthansa, went down.