Cargo Plane Missing En Route to Karachi, Search Underway

Pakistani rescuers scoured the waters around the presumed crash site of a cargo plane on Wednesday, hours after it lost contact with air traffic control en route to Karachi.

The aircraft was operated by K2 Airways, a private cargo airline in Pakistan that operates scheduled and charter flights domestically and internationally.

What's happening in the search operation?

The airline said it was cooperating with Pakistani Civil Aviation Authority and other government agencies. It said that five people — two pilots, two engineers and one member of support staff — were on board.

"We continue to pray, earnestly, for the safety ​of our colleagues," ‌the aircraft operator said on Facebook.

As of late Wednesday, the lost plane had not been found and there was no formal word on the crew's fate, but Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif expressed his "heartfelt condolences" to their families.

Authorities were conducting a coordinated search and rescue operation at sea through various agencies, the Pakistan Airports Authority ‌(PAA) said on Facebook.

The Associated Press cited officials "familiar with the rescue operation," speaking on condition of anonymity, as saying that the vast search area in the Arabian Sea and rough monsoon seas were posing significant challenges to the search-and-rescue operation.

What happened in the apparent crash?

A Boeing 737 cargo plane lost contact with air traffic control on Tuesday night, Pakistani aviation authorities said.

The aircraft had reported a technical problem while on its way from Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to Karachi.

The plane was ​flying over the Arabian Sea near Ormara in Balochistan, Pakistan — west of its destination in Karachi — when it went missing.

Rapid descent of plane over Pakistan

The Pakistan Airport Authority (PAA) said radar systems showed the aircraft descending rapidly and communication was lost.

According to global flight-tracking service, Flightradar24.com, preliminary data sent from the plane "indicated a loss of altitude, followed by a climb, and then a second, sudden and dramatic loss of altitude."

The ​last transmitted data point placed the aircraft at 1,100 feet (335 meters) above sea level, with a vertical rate ​of minus 22,400 feet ‌per minute — about 400 kilometers or250 miles per hour — an extremely steep and abnormal rate of descent.

"Anytime you see ⁠something ​extreme like that, it catches your eye, but it is too soon to say ​what any of it means without more information," Anthony Brickhouse, an aerospace safety consultant, told Reuters.

Passenger plane converted to cargo

Formerly, the aircraft was a passenger plane, manufactured in 1999, which had been operated by Aeroflot and Garuda Indonesia before being converted to a cargo configuration in 2012.

The 27-year-old missing aircraft is part of Boeing's 737 family but is two ​generations older than the 737 Max ‌version that suffered sevreral safety issues and was grounded as a result.

The last time a jetliner accident took place in Karachi was in May 2020 when a Pakistani plane carrying 98 people crashed in a crowded neighborhood near the airport, after an apparent engine failure during landing.

Pakistan released a report that concluded the crash, in which all but one of the passengers perished, was caused by human error from the pilot, the co-pilot and air traffic control.