Germanwings plane crash live: British victims named as investigation continues in French Alps

All 150 passengers and crew on board the Airbus A320 were killed in yesterday's disaster

Search and rescue personnel at the crash site of the Germanwings Airbus A320 in the French Alps (Getty Images)

The search operation to recover a Germanwings plane that crashed in the French Alps yesterday killing all 150 people on board has resumed. Here are the latest updates:

• New evidence suggests the plane's unexplained descent took at least 18 minutes, not eight
• At least three British citizens were on board, the Foreign Secretary has said
• Two have been officially named as Paul Andrew Bramley, 28, from Hull and Martyn Matthews, 50, from Wolverhampton
• The third British citizen was a baby travelling with his Spanish mother
• Witnesses have described the “picture of horror” on the mountainside
• A damaged but “useable” black box has been recovered from the scene
• Most passengers were German, including 16 pupils from the same school
• Other victims were from Spain, Australians, the Netherlands, Turkey, Denmark, Japan and Israel
• Germanwings crew members refused to fly yesterday for personal reasons
• Investigators have not ruled out any cause but terrorism is not considered likely

Please wait a moment for the live blog to load

Recovery efforts involving helicopters and hundreds of police on foot were called off yesterday evening as light faded under cloudy skies.

Flight 4U9525 was less than an hour from its destination of Dusseldorf on its journey from Barcelona when it unexpectedly went into a rapid descent yesterday morning.

The pilots did not send out a distress call and had lost radio contact with their control centre at around 10.50am local time (9.50am GMT), France's aviation authority said.

Data from Flightradar24 said the Airbus A320 initially climbed to 38,000ft, its cruising altitude, before descending rapidly for eight minutes and losing contact at about 6,800ft.

Witnesses who reached the crash site near the town of Seyne-les-Alpes and popular ski resort Pra Loup described “pulverised” debris and bodies scattered on the mountainside.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy are due to visit the scene today.