KEY POINTS:
The enormous boom shattered the quiet of a Mediterranean dusk for surfer Will Lliboutry and his friends.
They were looking out to sea, waiting for the right wave, when the noise hit them.
"It was like army planes, like a Mach 1, a Mach 2, accelerating," said Lliboutry,
29. "I thought, 'What the hell is that?' Then I looked up and saw a huge plane coming out of the cloud."
It took only seconds: the plane started to climb steeply, almost vertical, "heading to the sky".
"It was as though he was trying to climb away from the water. Then it stabilised and went flat again, for what felt like a second or two.
"Then it turned to the right, but was losing altitude, descending quickly. Then it nose-dived into the water. It headed down. It looked like the pilot was trying to do an emergency landing on the water, but it was impossible, it was too fast, and the nose went straight into the water."
Lliboutry, the 29-year-old president of the Canet surf club, said he saw the splash from several kilometres away.
He and his friends sprinted out of the water. "It was like chaos all along the beach. People were running out of the restaurants, yelling, calling for help," he said. "Everyone thought it must be a big passenger plane from Paris, full of people."
On a sailing boat offshore, the skipper saw the plane go down. He radioed Affaires Maritime Cross Med, the maritime safety authority. "The plane appears to be in several pieces," he told the operator.
Student pilot Jerome Mach, 31, had taken off from Perpignan Airport only 10 minutes after the Airbus 320. He shared the cockpit of a small twin-engined Piper Seminole PA44 with Jean Claude Malet, a 45-year-old Ecole Aero Pyrenees flight school instructor.
A little over an hour into the lesson, they heard the air controller call for T888 - the flight code that the Airbus was using, Malet told the Herald on Sunday.
"But there was no response. That's not very unusual though - sometimes pilots are not listening or radios are broken. The controller tried again, then contacted us and asked us to try, but we had no luck either."
At the controller's request, the two men flew over the area where the Air New Zealand plane was last seen on radar, 7km out to sea.
They immediately saw a big, white area in the ocean - "the size of two football fields" - of disturbed sand and water thrown up by the plane's impact. They radioed in their call-sign, Ulysse 34: "An aircraft has crashed, an aircraft has crashed," they repeated.
The air controller responded immediately. "Ulysse 34, confirm an aircraft crashed? Position?"
The Piper reported back, "We are off Canet-en-Rousillon on 110 PPG, 10.5nm, Ulysse 34, we are beginning to orbit the crash site."
"It all happened so quickly we didn't have time to think, but as soon as we saw the white area we knew it must be the plane," Mach said. "We stayed at 600m circling the area until a Navy aeroplane arrived to take over - but the plane never surfaced."
Malet, a former military pilot, said it was "very, very strange" that no mayday or emergency beacon was activated by the pilot. He was convinced the radio was broken.
A Securite Civile helicopter, call-sign Dragon66, was scrambled from Perpignan and on the scene within minutes. "No visual on the aircraft," the pilot reported. "Large white spot on the water, we can see debris over more than 1km."
It was not long before 5pm, closing time at Canet-de-Rousillon port, and one of the panicked surfers ran into the beach-front office of maritime licence instructor Valette Luc.
"A plane has crashed," he shouted.
Within minutes Luc, 44, a rescue volunteer for the Societe Nationale de Sauvetage en Mer, was steering the first boat out to sea.
As his wife translated, he explained how overwhelming the scale of the accident had been: "We had no idea what to expect at all when we headed out there."
By the time his boat with five crew made it to the scene, 15 minutes after the plane went down, debris from the plane covered a large area of water. Most of the pieces were little more than fragments - but floating just below the surface, he saw the 5m tail section with the distinctive blue and white koru.
At 5.30pm, as fishing boats rushed to join Luc's rescue crew, as helicopters and the Navy plane circled above, he spotted the remains of a body in the water. Seeing the condition of the body, he knew there was no hope of any survivors.
"The impact was so huge that the bodies are not going to be whole, at all," he said. "We will keep searching though. People have been searching, searching, searching, no one is giving up yet."
Many of the French fishing boats were damaged by the jagged pieces of metal in the water. Their skippers simply returned to the port for quick repairs - then rejoined the search.
