The death toll from the tragedy grew overnight as four of the seven passengers who were pulled alive from the wreckage lying strewn alongside the runway at Port Harcourt airport succumbed to severe burns.
Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja said 71 of the dead were from the Loyola Jesuit College in Abuja, students aged between 11 and 18 who were travelling home to the southeast of the country to spend Christmas with their families.
Accident investigators have found the airliner's "black box" flight data recorders and were sending them to Lagos for analysis, said a spokesman for the Civil Aviation Authority, Sam Aduroboye.
The crash, which came just seven weeks after a similar disaster killed 117 people, sparked the fury of President Olusegun Obasanjo, the press and the victims' relatives.
Many pointed to the poor safety record of Nigeria's motley crew of private airline operators.
"All Nigerian aircraft are flying coffins," wailed 24-year-old John Baligo, who came to Port Harcourt University Teaching Hospital to pick up the body of his elder brother.
Senior officials visiting the site of Saturday's disaster said the crowded Sosoliso Airlines DC-9 passenger jet appeared to have veered off the runway shortly after landing in heavy rain.
The plane apparently hit a drainage ditch and tore apart, transport minister Abiye Sekibo told reporters at the scene: "You can see that it hit this culvert. This is the reason for this accident. The man lost control because he hit this culvert."
Neither Saturday's crash nor the October 22 disaster in which another airliner crashed in fields north of Lagos has been fully explained.
There is mounting concern that Nigeria's ageing passenger jets and shoddy airport infrastructure are no longer fit to carry travellers safely.
The latest tragedy brought the number of dead in 39 Nigerian aviation accidents since 1991 to 1,021, according to an AFP tally of press reports.
Several of the crashes remain unexplained, in some cases several years after they took place.
Mr Obasanjo cancelled a planned state visit to Portugal and ordered aviation officials and airline executives to meet him on Tuesday in Abuja for emergency talks on safety for the country's ageing fleet of privately owned airliners, his spokeswoman Remi Oyo said.