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The AirAsia aircraft that crashed in the Java Sea climbed too fast before stalling, according to Indonesia’s transport minister.
Ignasius Jonan told a parliamentary hearing in Jakarta that flight QZ8501 had ascended at a speed of 6,000ft per minute.
No passenger or fighter jet would attempt to climb so fast, he said.
There were no survivors when the Airbus A320 with 162 people on board crashed on December 28 when flying from Surabaya to Singapore.
The aircraft is thought to have encountered difficulties from an approaching storm.
Citing radar data, Jonan said: “The plane, during the last minutes, went up faster than normal speed… then it stalled.
“I think it is rare even for a fighter jet to be able to climb 6,000ft per minute,” he told a House of Representatives commission.
“The average speed of a commercial aircraft is probably between 1,000 and 2,000ft per minute because the aircraft is not designed to soar so fast.”
The comments come after the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder were found last week.
Only 53 bodies have been retrieved so far from the crash area, where debris was scattered across the sea.
The fuselage of the aircraft, believed to hold most of the remaining bodies, has also been located and search teams are working out how to retrieve it.
Investigators have already said it is unlikely the crash was caused by terrorism, the BBC reported.