image: http://universalfreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/german-planecover1.jpg

The first thought that most of us suspicious types had when we heard about the crash of the Germanwings aircraft on Tuesday, was terrorists. But authorities were quick to deny that there was any indication that the crash was any type of terrorist plot.

Well, with the recovery of the recorder, that denial may have just went out the window so to speak. The voice recorder from the plane clearly shows that at least one of the pilots was locked out of the cockpit only moments before the plane crashed into the side of a mountain. The pilot on the doomed Germanwings airliner was locked out the cockpit moments before the plane crashed, killing all 150 on board. An investigator said that evidence from a voice recorder indicated that the pilot had left the cockpit and could not re-enter. He tried knocking lightly on the door, and when there was no immediate answer, he began knocking more loudly.

Finally, the source said, audio on the recorder revealed: “You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”  This would infer that either the other pilot was dead, unconscious, or was using the plane to commit suicide, taking the other passengers with him. The source said investigators did not yet know why the pilot left the cockpit. French aviation investigators said earlier Wednesday that they had not the “slightest explanation” for what happened.

With the admission from authorities that one of the pilots was locked out of the cockpit, the possible causes of the crash are rapidly dwindling. Either the pilot was deliberately locked out so he could not interfere with the actions of the other pilot, or the second pilot was physically unable to open the door. The Germanwings A320 ceased radio contact with air traffic controllers over the French Alps on a seemingly routine flight from Spain to Germany. Again there is no reason for them stopping communications unless the pilot was incapacitated or chose not to communicate with ground control.

Remi Jouty, the director of France’s aviation investigative agency, said the investigation could take weeks or even months. He said the plane was flying “until the end” — slamming into the mountain, not breaking up in the air. So this rules out a bomb or most types of electrical failures that could cause a crash. He said the final communication from the plane was a routine message about permission to continue on its route.

His briefing came after French President Francois Hollande said the second “black box,” the flight data recorder, was found but without any of its contents. The crash apparently dislodged the recorder’s memory card which is still missing. Again this shows that either the crash was deliberate or the pilot was disabled as no attempt appears to have been made to pull the plane up from its death spiral.

Search teams found the mangled first black box, the cockpit voice recorder, just hours after the crash Tuesday. Jouty said an audio file was recovered with “usable sounds and voices.” But he said it was too early to draw any conclusions from the recorder.

Investigators need the two black boxes to solve the biggest mystery: what caused the Airbus to descend over an 8-minute period without any pilot indication the aircraft was in trouble. The experienced pilot had the plane at 38,000 feet, but only for a minute. Then suddenly and inexplicably, the jet descended to 6,000 feet apparently still under control and without a single distress call or a request for permission to descend. Currently French investigators are focused on the final seconds before air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane.

One official, Segolene Royal, France’s Minister for Ecology, Sustainable Development and Energy, said Wednesday that the pilots stopped responding to radio calls after 10:31 a.m. local time, about 30 minutes into the flight. She said that the seconds after 10:30 a.m. are considered vital to the investigation.

The grim task of recovering bodies from the rugged terrain resumed Wednesday as investigators tried to piece together the many puzzles surrounding the crash. The single-aisle, medium-haul plane operated by a subsidiary of Lufthansa was less than an hour from completing its scheduled flight to Dusseldorf from Barcelona Tuesday morning when it unexpectedly went into a rapid descent, and ceased contact with air traffic controllers on the ground.

France’s civil aviation authority said the pilots had not sent out a distress call before losing radio contact with their control center. But that air traffic controllers issued an alarm after the plane disappeared from their radar screens. Moments later, the French military ordered a fighter jet to the area where the plane was last tracked. The secretary-general of France’s air traffic controllers union told the Journal that the plane did not appear to deviate from its flight plan as it went down, which is unusual for an aircraft in distress.

“If there’s a loss of control, pilots usually lose their way too,” Roger Rousseau told the Journal. “That didn’t happen in this case.” The wreckage was located at an altitude of about 6,550 feet at Meolans-Revels, near the popular ski resort of Pra Loup. The remote site is 430 miles south-southeast of Paris. French Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said the crash site covered several acres, with thousands of pieces of debris, “which leads us to think the impact must have been extremely violent at very high speed.” He said the crash left pieces of wreckage “so small and shiny they appear like patches of snow on the mountainside.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.