Fresh questions have been raised about the operation of Lion Air’s Boeing 737 Max 8 jet that crashed in Indonesia on Monday morning, killing 189 people, after reports that it flew erratically the previous day.

An air accident investigator said there had been technical issues on the plane on Sunday, including unreliable airspeed readings, and passengers spoke of a “rollercoaster” flight, an account backed up by data from flight tracking websites showing unusual changes in speed and height.

Just 13 minutes into its next flight, JT610 from Jakarta to Pangkal Pinang in the Indonesian tin-mining region, the plane dived sharply into the sea. Its pilots had asked to turn back shortly after takeoff.

Profile Boeing 737 Max 8 Show Hide The Lion Air plane that crashed into the sea moments after takeoff on Monday had been used by the airline for only two months. It has been described as the “world’s most reliable airplane”. The 737 MAX 8 model was first operated for a commercial flight in May 2017 by Malindo Air, but has since been adopted by airlines globally. The plane is a variant of the Boeing 737 Max series, which is the fastest selling plane in Boeing history. Worth upwards of £70m, the Max 8 version has an air range of 6,570km and a passenger capacity of up to 210. The planes are built at Boeing’s factory in Renton, Washington, in the US. The plane has been purchased by airlines across the world, including American Airlines, United Airlines, Ryanair, Jet Airlines, FlyDubai, Norwegian Air, Iceland Air, SilkAir, Turkish Airlines, Korean Air, Air Canada and Malaysia Airlines. In 2012, Lion Air was one of the first airlines to finalise an order – worth $22.4bn – with Boeing for the 737 Max. As of April this year, eight of the 201 planes ordered had been delivered to Lion Air. According to company reports, as of September 2018 the Boeing 737 Max had received 4,783 firm orders from more than 100 countries. Boeing says carbon emissions and cabin noise are down 20% and 40% respectively on previous models. The crash in Indonesia was the first incident involving the 737 Max model. In a statement released after the Indonesia crash, Boeing said the company “stands ready to provide technical assistance to the accident investigation".

Hundreds of rescue workers retrieved debris and personal items from the Java Sea on Tuesday, and police said human remains has been collected in 37 body bags. Relatives had gathered at a police hospital in Jakarta to provide DNA samples to identify victims.

Dozens of divers continued to search in 30-metre-deep water for the plane’s hull and black box flight recorder, to determine the causes of Indonesia’s second worst air disaster.

FlightRadar24 reported an unexplained drop in altitude just two minutes into Monday’s flight. The site’s data also showed the plane apparently dropping by 267 metres (875 feet) during the initial climb of its last successful flight, from Denpasar in Bali to Jakarta on Sunday evening.

According to Lion Air, a technical problem had occurred on that flight but had been resolved “according to procedure”.

Haryo Satmiko from Indonesia’s national transport safety committee confirmed that the problems on Sunday included unreliable airspeed readings. He said: “The suspected cause of the accident is still being investigated and it is making us all curious what could have caused it.”

Alon Soetanto, a passenger on the Sunday evening flight, told Indonesian television that the the plane dropped suddenly several times in the first few minutes of its flight. He said: “About three to eight minutes after it took off, I felt like the plane was losing power and unable to rise. That happened several times during the flight. We felt like in a rollercoaster. Some passengers began to panic and vomit.”

According to social media posts by passengers, there were also problems with the air conditioning system and cabin lighting before the plane departed several hours late. One, the TV presenter Conchita Caroline, claimed there was a “weird” engine noise upon takeoff that continued during the flight.

Safety experts said the erratic flight could point to a problem with the pitot tubes, which use air pressure to measure speed and altitude.

Tony Cable, an air accident investigator, said: “If they are flying on autopilot and the altitude indication goes funny, the aircraft will react. On highly automated aircraft crews can get rapidly overwhelmed when something goes wrong. You can find all sorts of systems dropping out and the crew struggling to cope.”

Misleading readings led to confused pilots crashing Air France flight A447 in 2009.

Cable said the high degree to which the plane had broken up on impact suggested a complete loss of control, and gave no indication of a controlled ditching of the plane in the sea.

Staff from Boeing are providing technical assistance to the investigation. The crash is the first involving the manufacturer’s 737 Max 8, a fuel-efficient update of its bestselling short-haul 737. Lion Air’s plane had only been in service since August, but had amassed hundreds of hours of flights. Indonesia’s transport minister ordered an inspection of all 737 Max planes on Tuesday, but did not ground the new models.

David Gleave, an aviation safety investigator, said that even if the 737’s airspeed indicators had failed, the crash raised more questions about the safety of Indonesian aviation. “It’s a high-stress technical failure, but the aircraft is quite capable technically of flying to a safe landing. If you go back through the history of Lion Air and its previous incarnations, it’s not an airline I would fly on.”

Indonesian airlines were for long periods banned from US and European skies, after a string of accidents. European regulators only lifted prohibitions on some carriers in June. Australia has told its officials and contractors not to fly on Lion Air pending findings from the crash investigation.