An Airbus A320 operated by the Germanwings airline, a budget subsidiary of German carrier Lufthansa, crashed Tuesday in the French Alps, apparently killing all of those on board.

The Associated Press cited regional official Eric Ciotti as saying wreckage from the plane had been discovered at Meolans-Revels, near a popular ski resort and west of the town of Digne-les-Bains. The actual wreckage was believed to be on the side of a mountain, inaccessible y roads and covered in heavy snow.

Germanwings said the plane, which had been en route from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany, was carrying 144 passengers and six crew members, raising by two a total headcount given earlier by French officials.

The airline's managing director Oliver Wagner said Germanwings would do everything possible to determine the cause of the crash, but that he had no information on what might have brought the plane down as of Tuesday afternoon.

"Our deep sympathy goes out to the relatives and friends of the victims," Wagner said.

French President Francois Hollande said search and rescue teams did not expect to find any survivors from the crash.

"It's a tragedy on our soil," the French leader said, adding that he would be in contact with his German counterpart Angela Merkel, as he expected many of the victims of the crash were German.

A red marker shows the location of Digne, in the French Alps, where a Germanwings A320 passenger plane crashed

A spokesman for Spain's Deputy Prime Minister Soraya Saenz de Santamaria said there were at least 45 people on the plane "with Spanish surnames," however, according to the Reuters news agency.

There was no immediate indication as to what might have caused the crash. Weather in the area was good. French media said the flight's crew issued a distress call to air traffic controllers at 9:47 a.m. GMT (5:47 a.m. Eastern).

Flight data from tracking websites suggested the plane dropped from a normal cruising altitude of about 38,000 feet to just 10,000 or 11,000 feet in the space of only 10 minutes before crashing.

Pierre Polizzi, who owns a campsite near the crash site, told The Associated Press he heard two long noises around the time the Germanwings plane went down.

"There are often fighter jets flying over, so I thought it sounded just like that. I looked outside but I couldn't see any fighter planes," he said. "The noise I heard was long -- like 8 seconds -- as if the plane was going more slowly than a military plane speed. There was another long noise about 30 seconds later."

French Interior Ministry spokesman Pierre-Henry Brandet said the jet crashed in the mountains at an altitude of about 6,550 feet. Crews were struggling to access the crash location due to the rugged terrain.

Brandet told BFM television that he expected "an extremely long and extremely difficult" search and rescue operation because of the area's remoteness.

Airbus told CBS News in a statement that the manufacturer was "aware of the media reports and all efforts are now going towards assessing the situation."

The Airbus A320 is a workhorse of the short and medium-haul passenger aviation business. More than 3,000 of them are in daily operation with airlines around the world.

"Age doesn't matter, maintenance matters" when it comes to passenger aircraft, CBS News travel editor Peter Greenberg said, adding that crash investigators would be looking closely at recent service logs for the plane.

Both Germanwings and its parent company Lufthansa have strong safety records.

Source: CBS News