Australian media has been reporting Sydney co-pilot Jeremy Webb ran for his life, along with his crew and 275 passengers from Emirates flight EK521, which crash-landed at Dubai airport and burst into flames on Wednesday.
The exact circumstances of the accident involving a Boeing 777 flying from India with 300 people on board were not immediately clear.
But the data, if confirmed by the plane's black boxes, indicate the plane had begun a second-landing attempt before it crashed to the ground.
Transponder data from the Boeing 777-300 obtained by aviation website FlightRadar24.com show the descending plane came close to the ground at 12:37 p.m. local time before altitude readings and the vertical speed suddenly increased, indicating the start of a go-around.
Jeremy Webb. Source: Facebook
That came around the same time an air traffic control radio recording has someone calling out the flight's number and saying "returning to 4,000."
"I think it indicates that there was some kind of effort to try to gain altitude," Mikael Robertsson, a co-founder of FlightRadar24, told The Associated Press.
But within 12 seconds, the aircraft descended and struck the ground, apparently bouncing back up briefly before coming down and stopping, according to the data.
At the time of the crash landing, the scorching mid-day sun had raised temperatures at the airport to a humid 49 degrees Celsius (120 degrees Fahrenheit). Barefoot passengers fleeing the plane said they burned their feet on the scalding tarmac.
While that's not an unusual temperature for this time of year, the hotter the conditions are, the harder it can be for engines to lift airplanes off the ground, according to experts.
Winds of 39 kilometers an hour (24 mph) blew toward the northwest at the airfield at the time of the crash-landing, according to the United Arab Emirates' National Center for Meteorology and Seismology.
The possibility of wind shear - a sudden change in wind speed or direction - is also being looked into by investigators, Emirates CEO and chairman Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed Al Maktoum has said.
An attempted go-around could explain why the grounded plane's landing gear did not appear to be extended.
"If the airplane had gone around, part of the maneuver is retracting the landing gear," said commercial airline pilot and author Patrick Smith.
"It's conceivable that during the go-around that they experienced a dangerous wind shear," he said.
John Gadzinski, an airline captain and aviation safety consultant, agreed that the transponder data was consistent with an attempted go-around by the crew.
He cautioned however that the readings are not as precise as those on the airplane's own flight data recorder, and that investigators will need more information to determine what went wrong.
Emirates officials have repeatedly declined to say definitively whether the plane was attempting to go around and whether the landing gear was properly deployed.
The UAE's General Civil Aviation Authority, which is leading the investigation, said Thursday it was still working to recover the flight data and cockpit voice recorders.
American and British investigators will participate in the probe because the Boeing plane was built in the U.S. and was powered by British-made Rolls-Royce Trent 800 engines.
Chicago-based Boeing said it is prepared to deploy a technical team to assist with the investigation in coordination with the US National Transportation Safety Board. It referred queries on the investigation to the GCAA, which plans to issue a preliminary report on the crash within a month.
All passengers 'safe'
Emirates said that all passengers and crew on board flight EK521 from Thiruvananthapuram to Dubai were accounted for and safe.
Sheikh Ahmed later told reporters later that 13 people on board were hospitalised, most of them for minor injuries.
The director general of the General Civil Aviation Authority, Saif al-Suwaidi, said in a statement that "one of the firefighters lost his life while saving the lives of the others."
Investigators had been sent to work with Emirates and the Dubai airport authorities, he said.
Emirates said that there were 282 passengers and 18 crew members on board, including 226 Indians, 24 Britons and 11 Emirati nationals.
Sheikh Ahmed said that the pilot was an Emirati with more than 7,000 hours of flight time and the aircraft had "all necessary inspection checks" before take-off.
Footage on social media showed thick black smoke coming out of the centre of the plane while the fuselage appeared to be lying on the runway with escape slides opened.
The crash continued to snarl travel plans well into Thursday and the timetable will not resume to normal for the next 48 hours as the airport manages a backlog of cancelled and delayed flights.
Dubai International Airport, the world's busiest in terms of international traffic, said it was running "under restricted capacity and has since continued to operate with one runway."
Some flights were being redirected to the city-state's second airport, Al Maktoum International Airport at Dubai World Central.
By Thursday night, investigators had removed the charred carcass of the plane from the runway and reopened the affected runway, Dubai Airports CEO Paul Griffiths said. The crash-landing did little damage to the runway itself as the plane came to rest and burned off to the side of it, he said.
'I ran without my shoes'
Shaji Kochikutty, who was on board the plane with his wife and three daughters, recounted surviving the "near disaster."
"We are grateful to be alive. What more can we ask for?" the Dubai-based businessman said, speaking to weekly newspaper XPRESS.
After the plane caught fire on landing, airline staff "opened all emergency exits and guided us out," Kochikutty said.
"I first sent my three daughters. My wife went next but hurt her knee while jumping out. I bruised my feet as I ran without my shoes. We were promptly given first aid and we are all fine now," he said.
The accident comes almost four months after a plane belonging to Dubai's other carrier, flydubai, crashed and burst into flames as it was landing in Rostov-on-Don, in southern Russia, killing all 61 people onboard.
On July 26, an Emirates Boeing 777-300 aircraft heading to the Maldives made an emergency landing in Mumbai because of a "technical fault".
Airport authorities halted all operations at Dubai International Airport for around four hours Wednesday, causing delays and diversions.
Arriving planes were diverted to other airports in the UAE, Oman, and Bahrain, Emirates said.
Despite later resuming operations, Dubai International said its capacity was still restricted and it was operating with one runway.
It is the world's largest air hub in terms of international passengers, and is the base for Emirates, from where it serves more than 153 destinations.
Dubai opened a smaller second airport, Al-Maktoum International, in 2013.
Emirates, Qatar Airways and Abu Dhabi's Etihad have seized a significant portion of transcontinental travel, capitalising on the geographic locations of their Gulf hubs.
Emirates is the largest single operator of the Boeing 777, as well as the Airbus A380 superjumbo, and expanded its fleet to 250 aircraft last year.
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