By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: The search for five crew members of a cargo plane that vanished into the Arabian Sea earlier this week stretched into a third day Friday, as Pakistani authorities reported finding additional wreckage but no sign of the missing crew.
The Pakistan Airports Authority said search and rescue teams from the Pakistan Navy and the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency continued to comb the deep water off the country’s southern coast, deploying both aircraft and ships in an operation officials described as intensive.
“The search for the crew members is continuing with full vigour through the coordinated employment of aerial and sea-borne assets,” the authority said in a statement.
Investigators have recovered additional pieces of the wrecked aircraft and are analysing them, the authority said, adding that it would provide updates as the search continued.
The Boeing 737-400 cargo jet, operated by the Karachi-based carrier K2 Airways, disappeared from radar Tuesday night while flying from Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, to Karachi. The plane vanished about 300 kilometers west of Karachi as it approached Pakistani airspace, according to aviation officials.
Before losing contact, the pilot had reported a navigation problem at 9:18 p.m. Pakistan time — 1618 GMT — and asked for help from the area control center, the Pakistan Airports Authority said. Flight-tracking data from Flightradar24 showed the aircraft’s altitude changing erratically before it entered a steep descent.
Search crews located wreckage roughly 53 nautical miles — about 98 kilometers — south of Ormara port on Wednesday, following a 12-hour search of the deep sea. Navy and maritime security teams have since turned their efforts toward locating the plane’s flight recorders, which could offer investigators their clearest picture yet of what went wrong.
Five people were aboard the aircraft: two pilots, two engineers, and one support staff member. K2 Airways has not officially declared their status.
Among them was Faisal Jatoi, a Pakistani co-pilot whose family spent Thursday in an agonising wait for word of his fate.
Jatoi’s father-in-law, Ghulam Nabi Bahrani, said the family grew alarmed when they could not reach him. A search online surfaced the word “crash.”
“That moment felt like doomsday for us,” Bahrani said in an interview at his home in Karachi to Reuters. Jatoi is married and has a two-year-old son.
The aircraft that went down was 27 years old, according to Bahrani, and had spent 10 days in Sharjah undergoing repairs after a cargo delivery. The crew had been waiting on a spare part shipped from the United States before they could fly the plane back to Karachi, he said.
K2 Airways is a private carrier that has operated out of Karachi since May 2018, when it was granted an airline charter license by the Pakistani government.
The recovery effort may prove to be among the most difficult in Pakistan’s recent aviation history, according to a Pakistani aviation expert. Water depths in the stretch of the Arabian Sea where the wreckage was found range from roughly 2,500 to more than 3,500 meters. Strong currents, poor underwater visibility, an uneven seabed, and shifting sea conditions could all complicate efforts to retrieve the submerged wreckage and the aircraft’s flight recorders.
Pakistani officials have not said how long the search is expected to continue.
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