The Boeing 737 model that crashed in China has crashed before, but is considered one of the world's safest planes

• A Boeing 737 plane crashed in China on Monday afternoon with 132 people on board.
• The plane model is considered one of the world's safest.

A Boeing 737 crashed in China on Monday afternoon, a rare incident to strike a model of plane considered one of the safest in the world.

China Eastern Airlines flight MU5735 was travelling from Kunming Changshui International Airport to Guangzhou Baiyun International Airporwith 132 people on board, including nine crew members.

There is so far no information available about the cause of the crash, or whether there are survivors.

The Boeing 737 is one of the most-used plane models on the planet — and is considered one of the safest plane models.

The China Eastern Airlines plane that crashed on Monday was a 737-800 NG, a relatively modern variant of the 737.

Aviation consultancy Cirium told Bloomberg that the Boeing's NG models of the 737 have one of the best safety records of any plane.

It said there had been 11 fatal accidents of the 7,000 planes in used since 1997.

Paul Hayes, director of air safety and insurance at Cirium, told Bloomberg: "The 737 NG has been in operation for 25 years and has an excellent safety record."

"I'm not going to speculate on what happened but if the Flightfadar24 logs are accurate, something seems to have happened abruptly and the plane nose dived from cruising altitude."

(The data showed a sudden descent from 29,000 ft, as reported earlier by Insider.)

Data from aviation safety website AirSafe also ranked the 737 plane as one of the world's safest.

It said the Boeing 737-600/700/800/900 plane models have a crash rate of 0.07 crashes per million flights, and that the crash rate of the Boeing 737 model overall is 0.24 crashes per million flights.

That compares to 0.46 crashes per million flights for all models of the Airbus A300, and 1.35 crashes per million flights for all models of the Airbus A310.

It's also a lower rate than other Boeing plane models including the Boeing 767 and Boeing 727.

Notable 737 crashes in the past include an Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737-800 plane which crashed into the sea with no survivors in January 2010, a FlyDubai Boeing 737-800 plane that crashed during its landing with no survivors in March 2016, and a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737-700 plane that made an emergency landing in April 2018, when one passenger died.

Read Insider's full coverage of the China Eastern Airlines crash here.