French President Francois Hollande, Germany's Angela Merkel and Spain's Mariano Rajoy are visiting an area near the site of yesterday's plane crash in the French Alps.
The three met rescue workers and police at the crisis centre set up in the wake of the air disaster.
Lufthansa has said it could not explain why its Germanwings Airbus crashed into an Alpine ravine killing all 150 on board.
Investigators are trying to discover what caused the first major air disaster in France in 15 years.
They said the remoteness of the crash site meant it could be days before a clear picture emerged of the tragedy.
However, they said the fact that debris was restricted to a small area showed the A320 was not likely to have exploded in mid-air, suggesting a terrorist attack was not to blame.
"It is inexplicable this could happen to a plane free of technical problems and with an experienced, Lufthansa-trained pilot," Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr said.
Lufthansa said the 24-year-old plane had on Monday had repairs to the hatch through which the nose wheel descends for landing.
A spokeswoman said that was not a safety issue but that repairs had been done to reduce noise.
Police and forensic teams on foot and in helicopters investigated the site about 100km north of Nice where the airliner came down en route to Dusseldorf from Barcelona.
"When we go to a crash site we expect to find part of the fuselage. But here we see nothing at all," said pilot Xavier Roy, coordinating air operations.
He said teams of investigators had been dropped by helicopter onto the site and were working roped together at altitudes of around 2,000 meters.
It would take at least a week to recover all the remains of the victims, he said.
No distress call was received before the crash, but French authorities said one of the two "black box" flight recorders, the cockpit voice recorder, had been recovered, albeit in need of repair.
"The black box has been damaged. We will have to put it back together in the next few hours to be able to get to the bottom of this tragedy," Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told RTL radio.
French Alps plane crash: What we know
Seyne-Les-Alpes will receive the bereaved relatives who are travelling from Germany and Spain.
Teams of psychologists will be on hand, and a youth sports club has been converted into a makeshift chapel.
In all, 72 Germans were killed in the crash, the first major air passenger disaster on French soil since the 2000 Concorde accident just outside Paris.
Germanwings company executive Thomas Winkelmann estimated there had been 35 Spanish victims, a figure far lower than the 49 cited by the Spanish government.
Other victims included an American, a Moroccan and citizens of Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Colombia, Denmark, Israel, Japan, Mexico and the Netherlands, French officials said.
At least three British people died in the crash.
Paul Andrew Bramley, 28, who was originally from Hull, and father-of-two Martyn Matthews, 50, from Wolverhampton, were among the 144 passengers on board.
Marina Bandres Lopez Belio, 37, originally from Spain but living in Manchester, died with her seven-month-old son Julian Pracz-Bandres when the jet crashed in the Alps yesterday.
Her husband Pawel Pracz revealed that she had been visiting her family in Spain for her uncle's funeral and bought the tickets at the last moment.
Among the victims were 16 teenagers and two teachers from the Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium high school in the town of Halternam See in northwest Germany.
They were on their way home after a Spanish exchange visit near Barcelona.
The school held a day of mourning today. A hand-painted sign said simply: "Yesterday we were many, today we are alone."
Barcelona's Liceu opera house said two singers, Kazakhstan-born Oleg Bryjak and German Maria Radner, died while returning to Dusseldorf after performing in Wagner's Siegfried.
Germanwings said yesterday the plane started descending a minute after reaching cruising height and lost altitude for eight minutes.
Experts said that while the Airbus had descended rapidly, it did not seem to have simply fallen out of the sky.
The A320 is one of the world's most used passenger jets and has a good safety record.
At 24 years old, the plane was older than many other planes at Lufthansa, where the average age of its fleet is 11.5 years.
The plane was delivered to Lufthansa in 1991 and had clocked up around 58,000 flight hours over the course of over 46,000 flights, Airbus said.
Germanwings said it cancelled one flight today and was using 11 planes from other carriers for about 40 flights after some of its crew members had refused to fly.
Employees laid candles and flowers by Germanwings headquarters at Cologne/Bonn airport, while Lufthansa and Germanwings staff worldwide held a moment of silence at 9.53am Irish time - the moment the plane went missing.
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