China Dismisses Report Plane Crash Followed 'Intentional' Nosedive

China's civil aviation authority on Wednesday sought to dismiss reporting by The Wall Street Journal after the newspaper said the crash of a China Eastern airliner in March may have been deliberate.

The Journal cited people familiar with a preliminary assessment done by U.S. officials, who have access to data from both "black boxes" that were on board flight MU5735 when it went down in southern China, killing 132 people in what was the country's deadliest air disaster in nearly three decades.

In a statement released through the state-run Chinese tabloid the Global Times, the Civil Aviation Administration of China didn't address the details in the report, but said U.S. investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board assured the agency that they hadn't disclosed any information about the probe to the press.

The U.S. investigators were cooperating with the CAAC, and "continue to provide professional technical support to identify the cause of the accident as needed," its statement read. The aviation authority said it would release details about the probe "timely and accurately," but didn't say when it would expand on the preliminary report it put out last month.

Part of the CAAC statement was also carried by China Eastern, which reposted it to its official page on Weibo, the country's main social media website.

According to The Journal's May 17 report, flight data from one of the recorders suggested "inputs to the controls pushed the plane into the fatal dive" on March 21. The Boeing 737-800, widely regarded as a reliable airframe, plunged into mountainous terrain in China's southern region of Guangxi from cruising altitude in fair weather.

"The plane did what it was told to do by someone in the cockpit," the paper said of the "intentional nosedive," citing a person familiar with the latest assessment on the U.S. side. Chinese investigators, meanwhile, were yet to identity any mechanical issues with the aircraft involved in the crash, it said.

"Neither Boeing Co. nor air-safety regulators have been working on any service bulletins or safety directives stemming from the crash," as would be the case if any underlying technical faults had been discovered, The Journal noted.

"There is also a possibility that someone else on the plane could have broken into the cockpit and deliberately caused the crash," The Journal's sources said. China Eastern, however, told the paper that such a scenario wasn't plausible, as no emergency codes were sent from the plane prior to the crash.

China Eastern grounded its Boeing 737-800 fleet after the incident and resumed flights in the middle of last month. The CAAC's April 20 report found "no abnormality" in the communications between MU5735's crew and air traffic control before the plane made its rapid descent, which flight-tracking data recorded at a rate of nearly 31,000 feet per minute.

China's civil aviation authority said the aircraft involved was airworthy and its crew highly experienced, details that have only added to the mystery of the circumstances surrounding the incident, which claimed the lives of 123 passengers and nine crew. It was the country's first fatal air crash in over a decade and its deadliest since 1994.