Pakistan locates missing K2 Airways cargo Boeing 737 off Arabian Sea

Pakistani officials announced Wednesday that the K2 Airways Boeing 737 cargo plane that disappeared on Tuesday over the Arabian Sea has been located 53 nautical miles south of Ormara, a coastal city in Balochistan. The aircraft vanished from radar about 80 minutes into its two-hour flight from Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, to Karachi, and the search involved multiple agencies operating from the sea.

Three minutes before the aircraft’s loss of contact, the pilots transmitted a message about a "navigational system issue" and were subsequently guided by air traffic control in Karachi, the Pakistan Airports Authority said in a post on the social platform X. Flight-tracking data showed the plane descending, climbing briefly, then plunging at an estimated 22,400 feet per minute, far exceeding typical commercial descent rates of around 3,000 feet per minute.

Wreckage photographs released by authorities show sections of the fuselage, tail and other components. K2 Airways, a Karachi-based cargo carrier, confirmed cooperation with the investigation and posted the names of the five crew members – a pilot, a first officer, a load master and two engineers – on its Facebook page. The aircraft, registered AP-BOI, was 27 years old, originally delivered to Aeroflot in 1999, later operated by Garuda Indonesia, converted to a freighter in 2011, and leased by K2 Airways in 2024. Boeing did not respond to a request for comment.

The incident adds to a series of major aviation accidents in Pakistan over the past two decades, including the 2020 crash of a Pakistan International Airlines Airbus A320 that killed 98 people.