[Watch] China Jet’s Vertical Plunge From 29,000 Ft Baffles Experts

New Delhi: The China Eastern Boeing 737’s nosedive has baffled crash experts.

Flight MU5735, with 132 people onboard, plunged vertically, losing almost 26,000 feet in 1 minute, 35 seconds as it crashed into a mountainous region in southwest China.

The jet was flying from Kunming to Guangzhou.

In one video that has surfaced on social media, the jet is seen diving straight into the ground. The footage is from a mining company’s security camera, according to reports.

But there is no official confirmation about the authenticity of the video.

“It’s an odd profile,” John Cox, an aviation safety consultant and former 737 pilot, told Bloomberg. “It’s hard to get the airplane to do this.”

“It’s very odd,” Jeff Guzzetti, formerly with US’s Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), told Bloomberg.

In an article in The Guardian, Tony Cable, an air accident investigator, said that “loss of control event” or “high altitude stall” were among the possible causes.

According to the article, “others said that the pattern of the flight shown on tracking sites… appeared similar to the Germanwings crash in 2015”.

The Germanwings Airbus A320 was crashed deliberately into the French Alps by the pilot, killing himself and 149 people on board.

David Learmount, consulting editor at Flightglobal, told The Guardian: “We don’t have any direct evidence but we can observe that at this stage when we had observed the Germanwings disappearance, when it descended to destruction the two profiles looked very similar — so it is worrying.”

Flight MU5735 was at 29,000 feet when the steep plunge began. It began falling at more than 30,000 feet per minute, according to tracking data by Flightradar24.

Guzzetti and Cox, however, cautioned that the Flightradar24 data is preliminary.