16 German school pupils from the same class all die on board doomed Germanwings flight that killed 150

16 school pupils and two teachers who perished when Germanwings Airbus A320 crashed in the French Alps today - killing all 150 people aboard.

The students who are all understood to be in their teens were pupils at the English-
speaking Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium in Haltern-am-See, near Dusseldorf.

The Year 10 pupils were returning home from a week-long exchange programme in Barcelona when the plane went down in a remote region of the French Alps.

Their heartbroken classmates and locals have been lighting candles at their school, while an emotional mass is held in the Spanish town they stayed in.

This afternoon it emerged that the pupils almost missed the doomed flight when one of the students left her passport behind. 

But in a tragic twist her host family offered to race the girl and all her travel documents to the airport directly, allowing them to make the flight in time, Also two leading opera singers Maria Radner and Oleg Bryjak are identified by an opera house in Dusseldorf as victims of the plane crash.