White roses will be laid and church bells will toll to mark the 10th anniversary of a plane crash that killed all 150 people on board.
Monday is a decade since Germanwings Flight 9525 went down in the French Alps after departing Barcelona, Spain, en route to Düsseldorf, Germany.
Investigators later determined that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashed the aircraft.
Among the victims were 15 students and two teachers from Haltern am See, Germany, returning from a Spanish exchange trip.
The passenger manifest also included two babies, two renowned German opera singers, a member of an Argentine rock band, three generations of one family, a mother and son on vacation, and a recently married couple.
Memorial services are scheduled for 10am local time, the precise moment of the crash, both at the German high school that lost so many students and in Le Vernet, the French village closest to the crash site.
Students in Haltern will lay white roses in remembrance, accompanied by the tolling of church bells.
“There was hardly a family that wasn’t affected somewhere in their circle of friends or relatives," the high school’s principal, Christian Krahl, told German news agency dpa.
Many family members also travelled to Le Vernet.
Lufthansa, which owned Germanwings, is inviting the victims' relatives every year to the village near the crash site and is expecting around 300 mourners to attend this year’s memorial service, dpa reported.
Commemorations are also planned at the airports in Düsseldorf and Barcelona. At Düsseldorf Airport, a book of condolences was available in the so-called Room of Silence for employees and travellers, dpa reported.
The crash shocked and caused disbelief when investigators revealed that Mr Lubitz locked the flight's captain out of the cockpit to deliberately set the plane on a collision course with a mountainside.
Mr Lubitz had in the past suffered from depression, but authorities and his airline later deemed him fit to fly.
In the months ahead of the crash, he suffered from sleeplessness and feared losing his vision, but he hid that from his employer.
“This state of shock, the deeply felt sympathy of all the residents for the families and the question of why this happened are still with us today,” Haltern Mayor Andreas Stegemann told dpa.
“The Germanwings crash is a permanent part of our town's history..”
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