GERMANY: The smell of pine cones and kerosene hangs in the air in the wooded hills of Germany overlooking Lake Constance. In a small clearing, pine trees are snapped in half like matches, others are scorched black, and yellow fibreglass insulation hangs from branches like snow.
In a corner lies a 12-metre red and white fragment of what was a Boeing cargo aircraft owned by the courier company DHL.
Shortly after midnight on Monday, its pilots tried in vain to avoid an oncoming Russian plane flying at the same altitude.
Both planes collided in an explosion of fire and smoke, then plunged 12 kilometres into the dark woods.
Ms Maria Reichenbach, from the Black Forest, was visiting her cousin in a house 500 metres away.
"There was a bang like lightning and my nephew ran in from outdoors: 'It's burning, it's burning'." From her cousin's balcony she saw "an explosion of fire like a pyramid", a fire which burned into the morning.
A neighbour saw "a plane drop out of the sky like a stone".
Miraculously, both planes came crashing to earth in deserted areas and there were no injuries among the 28,000 residents of Überlingen, a picturesque spa town near Friedrichshafen.
Sixty-five years after the explosion of the Hindenburg zeppelin, which killed 36 people, the sky over Lake Constance, on the Swiss-German border, was filled with exploding fire balls.
"I heard a crack and then I saw a bright light. I thought: 'it's not a full moon'. When I looked out the window, I saw the fire," a resident told local radio.
The Russian plane, en route to Barcelona, crashed in a field north of Überlingen. Police kept the crash site sealed yesterday, but reports said a large part of the main cabin of the plane, a Tupelov 154, was intact on the ground, with many of the 69 dead passengers still strapped into their seats.
At least 50 of the dead are believed to be younger than 18 and were on a UN-sponsored trip to Spain.
Their relatives are expected in Germany today, when investigators will begin examining the plane's flight recorder.
The narrow streets of Überlingen were mainly deserted yesterday, with only small groups of locals on street corners discussing the tragedy in the skies over their town, one of the main air routes to Switzerland.
"We were used to a lot of air traffic but something like this will make sure it is a long time before we can calm down again," said one woman.
The state premier, Mr Erwin Teufel, expressed his sympathy to the families of the victims.
"It is impossible to put yourself in the position of these families," he said, whose loved ones were victims of a "highly-improbable tragedy".
He also called for a revision of air traffic agreements, long a cause of friction between Germany and Switzerland. "We are looking forward to discussing with Switzerland a way of reducing the over-burdened air corridor over Lake Constance."
He also called for the ratification of an already agreed air traffic policy between the countries.
Investigators have ruled out mechanical error as a cause of the collision, but now face a difficult task ahead determining what happened in the seconds before the impact.
The DHL Boeing crash killed its two pilots, Canadian Mr Brant Campiori and Mr Paul Phillips, a British father of three.
High in the hills overlooking the lake, two teams of investigators and firemen worked through the night and yesterday at the scene of the Boeing crash.
Scattered on the ground over a 50-metre radius were the surviving contents of the doomed cargo aircraft: a guidebook to Venice, chemistry papers and computer manuels lying among smouldering plastic DHL packaging.
The noxious fumes of melting plastic filled the air and small red and white fragments of the plane's exterior crunched under foot.
The investigators have begun their meticulous search for clues.
