Second black box also suggests Alps crash was deliberate

France BEA's aviation investigators said a second black box recovered from the Germanwings crash site indicated that the copilot deliberately crashed the airplane.

"A first reading shows that the pilot in the cockpit used the automatic pilot to put the airplane on a descent towards an altitude of 100 feet," the BEA investigation office said in a statement.

"Then several times the pilot modified the automatic pilot settings to increase the speed of the airplane as it descended," it added.

Audio evidence from the first black box appeared to suggest that the captain was deliberately locked out of the cockpit by the co-pilot, who then deliberately took the plane into a descent.