Flight MU5735 Update: Pilots Battled To Control China Eastern Plane After First Dive, Data Suggests

As family members of those on board the ill-fated China Eastern Airlines aircraft await answers, flight data provided by an air traffic monitoring service revealed the plane pulled out of the first dive before another sent it crashing.

Flight MU5735 went down Monday with 132 people on board. The plane was en route to Guangzhou after taking off from Kunming, in the southwest, before it crashed into a mountain.

The flight data suggests the pilots pulled out of a 22,000 foot nosedive and briefly started climbing before a second dive sent it to the ground, the South China Morning Post reported.

No survivors have been found in the wreckage of the Boeing 737-800 so far. FlightRadar24 suggested the plane was at an altitude of 29,100 feet when it went into a high-speed dive to 9,075 feet in 2.15 minutes. The plane lost altitude at a maximum rate of about 31,000 feet per minute (348 mph or 560km/h).

Twenty seconds into the dive, the rate of descent slowed, and over the next 45 seconds the dive was further arrested until the plane leveled off 7,425 feet above the ground. The plane then began climbing, but just 15 seconds later -- at 8,600 feet -- it went into a second dive, the data suggests. About 30 seconds later, the plane slammed into the ground.

"The preliminary data indicate it was near the speed of sound," said John Hansman, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology astronautics and aeronautics professor who reviewed Bloomberg's calculation of the jet's speed. "It was coming down steep."

This decline in altitude, from cruising to landing, usually takes about 30 minutes. The final contact from the plane's computers was sent at 2:22 pm at an altitude of 3,225 feet.

Video footage widely circulated on Chinese social media appeared to show the plane in a near-vertical dive.

The investigators combed the wreckage of the plane Tuesday to locate the flight recorders or identify what caused the plane to go down. Wallets and phones lay scattered on the muddy ground, but there was still no sign of their owners as of Wednesday morning. Local media reports said heavy rains hampered the recovery operations.