Alps crash

For a long time, the French town of Barcelonette was principally famous for being a 'gap' in Louis XIV's 'iron frontier' of fortresses through which foreign armies could invade France and one which the Sun King and his ministers desperately tried to plug with more defensive fortifications.  Now it has a more macabre resonance with 148 people - including 16 German children returning from an exchange trip to Spain - perishing as the plane they were travelling on plummeted 30,000 feet into the Alps.  Barcelonette is the closest urban centre to the crash site.
The remote wilderness of the debris-strewn area is hampering recovery efforts but in some ways was essential to avoiding any more fatalities.  Aeroplane disasters are incredibly rare in north-central Europe and the last one to afflict France was Concorde's last flight in 2000 when it fell from the sky killing all onboard and four on the ground.  Unlike Concorde which was an ageing unsafe design, the Airbus A320 has arguably allowed the European aerospace company to supersede Boeing by being the workhorse of the aviation world from the 1990s onwards.  Checked routinely only the day before (albeit not a full in-depth check as is carried out every 18 months), this was just supposed to be another routine flight from Barcelona (no relation to Barcelonette) to Düsseldorf.  The impeccable safety record adds to the mystery.
It is always the most heartbreaking when children are killed in any circumstances and certainly in something as senseless as this.  The accoutrements of childhood as chilling memento mori of life never to be fulfilled, snatched away before they had any time to truly experience it.  A wealth of memories from the exchange trip annihilated.  It is comparable to the 45 Russian children killed in 2002 Überingen mid-air collision when an air traffic controller mistakenly directed the civilian aircraft into the the path of a cargo transport plane (though managerial incompetence and negligence of the privately run air traffic centre was the true guilty party).  By coincidence, their destination was Barcelona.  Überingen had a gruesome legacy as the air traffic controller was murdered (in front of his wife and three children) by one of the grieving fathers.  The killer was imprisoned before being released because his mental condition had not been sufficiently considered.  Like the (dubiously) convicted Lockerbie bomber's arrival in Libya, the Russian received a hero's welcome in his region of North Ossetia (where blood feuds are common) and was appointed a deputy minister.  There is no politics in today's Alps tragedy, just pure, horrific sadness.