Niece of Germanwings victim haunted by last eight minutes of flight

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Sandrine Driessens, niece of 59-year-old Belgian father and grandfather Christian, said the thought is 'very hard'
'For eight long minutes, he was dying. This is atrocious,' she said
But a British aviation expert said it is unlikely passengers knew they were going to die
Instead, he said, the plane would have been filled with 'eerie silence'

By Fidelma Cook In France and Jake Wallis Simons For Mailonline

Published: 12:01 EST, 25 March 2015 | Updated: 15:56 EST, 25 March 2015

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A niece of one of the victims of the Germanwings crash is haunted by the 'atrocious' thought that her uncle spent the last eight minutes of his life knowing he was going to die.

Sandrine Driessens, niece of 59-year-old Belgian father and grandfather Christian Driessens, said that the thought was 'very hard'.

'My uncle certainly knew that he was living his last moments and it's very hard to hear that the descent of the aircraft lasted eight minute,' she told La Provence newspaper.

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Loving: Christian Driessens, 59, pictured second from right, was a keen traveller. He was killed when the Germanwings A320 crashed in the Alps on Tuesday

Happy: Although Christian Driessens' niece said she was haunted by the idea that he knew he was going to die for eight minutes while the plane was descending, an aviation expert has said that it is more likely that the passengers and crew were calm and did not realise that they were in mortal danger

'For eight long minutes, he was dying. This is atrocious! I dare not imagine the horror of parents who tried to protect their babies in this airplane.'

But a veteran A320 pilot has said that the passengers would have been unlikely to know that they were going to die.

If anything, he said, the plane would have been filled with 'eerie silence'.

'It is likely that there was a problem with the pilots, as they put the plane into descent but failed to control it,' said Tony Newton, who is also an examiner for Britain's Civil Aviation Authority.

'The aircraft descended at fairly normal rate, in a fairly normal way. It was steep, but I have used steeper descents on a regular basis. It was well within the everyday operation and not in any way terrifying.'

Witnesses say they saw plane flying at low alltitude

It is likely the oxygen masks were released, he said, and if passengers did not put them on quickly enough they may have lost consciousness.

There also may have been 'unpleasant noises and wind effects', which may have caused some alarm. But the plane was not 'tumbling out of the sky in a screaming dive'.

'The crew was probably sitting there waiting for the pilot to complete the descent,' he said. 'There was probably no indication to passengers of what the end was going to be.

'There may have been some panic when they saw the mountains coming up through the windows, but it would have been brief.

'Either way, in my experience, passengers tend to stay absolutely silent during an emergency.

'It's not a Hollywood panic, it's an eerie silence.'

Mr Driessens, born in Kinshasha, had returned to Belgium in 1960 and lived in Couvin and Mons.

After meeting his Catalan born wife, Monserat Domingo, the couple settled down in Palleja, 25 km from Barcelona. They had three sons aged 17 to 31, and three grandchildren.

'He was a wonderful man who loved his family above all,' said Ms Driessens. 'For more than 30 years he travelled almost weekly in his job. But in this family we're birds. Drissens are globe-trotters who love to travel.'

French interior ministry release video of crash site