* German Airbus destroyed in remote area of ravines

* First black box damaged but thought to be viable

* Terror attack not seen likely

* Leaders of France, Germany, Spain visit crash area

* Victims include German school party, opera singers

(Reuters) – 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 travelled to the crash site in a remote French Alpine region to pay tribute to the 150 victims, mostly Germany 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.

“We have just been able to extract a useable audio data file,” BEA director Remi Jouty told a news conference at its headquarters outside Paris.

“We have not yet been able to study and to establish an exact timing for all the sounds and words heard on this file,” he said.

He expected initial analysis in “a matter of days” but that rough read-out could be subject to errors and that more work would be needed for a full interpretation.

Although he said “words” had been heard on the tape, Jouty would not confirm whether that meant the Airbus A320’s pilots were conscious and he gave no details of the recordings.

Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve earlier said a terror attack was not the main hypothesis being worked on. Jouty said, however, that no theory could be excluded at this point.

SOURCE REUTERS, Read more..