By Staff Reporter
KARACHI: A cargo plane carrying five crew members disappeared over the Arabian Sea late on Tuesday as it neared the end of an overnight flight from the United Arab Emirates to Pakistan, setting off a sea-and-air search by the military that stretched into Wednesday morning without any confirmed sign of the aircraft or those aboard.
The Boeing 737-400 freighter, operated by the Karachi-based carrier K2 Airways and flying as Flight KTA1732, had been bound for Jinnah International Airport in Karachi after departing Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, Tuesday afternoon. The crew radioed air traffic controllers around 9:18 p.m. local time to report a problem with the plane’s navigation system, and controllers at Karachi’s Area Control Centre began guiding the aircraft, according to a statement from the Pakistan Airports Authority.
Three minutes later, at 9:21 p.m., the plane appeared on radar screens descending sharply and turning abruptly off course. Radar and radio contact with the crew was lost soon after, roughly 155 nautical miles — about 287 kilometers — west of Karachi, the airports authority said. As of Wednesday morning, no wreckage had been recovered, and no further contact had been made with the crew.
Flightradar24, a commercial flight-tracking service that monitors aircraft transponder data worldwide, said the plane’s automated position reports showed a similarly erratic flight path in its final minutes: an initial loss of altitude, then a brief climb, followed by a second, far steeper descent. The company said the last data it received placed the aircraft about 1,100 feet above sea level, descending at a rate of roughly 22,400 feet per minute — a sink rate so extreme that aviation analysts said it would be consistent with a loss of control rather than a routine descent.
The company also said the plane had experienced interference with its satellite positioning system shortly after takeoff from Sharjah, a problem it said affected other aircraft crossing the same stretch of airspace that night and briefly degraded the quality of the position data it was receiving. Normal tracking data resumed once the aircraft flew clear of the affected area, well before the plane’s final, unexplained descent, the company said.
An air traffic controller told local media that the crew never issued a mayday call before contact was lost, and said the emergency appeared to have developed too quickly for the pilots to do so.
Pakistan’s Rescue Coordination Centre activated a multi-agency search within hours of losing contact with the plane. The Pakistan Navy diverted the frigate PNS Zulfiqar toward the aircraft’s last known position and later dispatched a second vessel, PNS Hunain, while a Navy patrol aircraft flew out from Turbat on Pakistan’s southwestern coast to join the search from the air. The Pakistan Air Force sent a Saab surveillance aircraft to assist, and a commercial vessel operated by the state-run Pakistan National Shipping Corporation was also diverted to help scan the search area, according to officials involved in the operation.
K2 Airways is a private cargo carrier based in Karachi that has operated since 2018, when it was granted an airline charter license by the Pakistani government. The missing aircraft, registered AP-BOI, was the airline’s sole plane, according to aviation trackers, and had a long history in commercial service before it came to K2. Records maintained by Flightradar24 and other aviation-tracking services show the jet first flew as a passenger plane for the Russian carrier Aeroflot in 1999, later flew for Indonesia’s Garuda Indonesia beginning in 2004, and was converted into a freighter in 2012, after which it flew cargo routes for the Belgian carriers TNT Airways and ASL Airlines before joining K2 Airways in 2024.
Pakistan’s Bureau of Air Safety Investigation, the agency responsible for probing civil aviation accidents in the country, is expected to investigate the circumstances of the aircraft’s disappearance once the search operation establishes what became of the plane.
The disappearance recalled an earlier Karachi air disaster involving a Russian-built cargo plane. In 2010, a Russian-operated cargo aircraft carrying eight people crashed into a residential neighborhood shortly after taking off from Karachi’s airport, bound for Khartoum, Sudan. All eight aboard were killed, and the crash ignited fires in nearby buildings that required a large-scale emergency response. Investigators at the time said that aircraft, too, had lost contact with air traffic control within minutes of departure.
As of early Wednesday, Pakistani authorities had not confirmed that Flight KTA1732 had crashed, and officials described the search as ongoing. Aviation investigators cautioned that flight-tracking data alone cannot establish a cause, and that a determination would depend on locating the wreckage and, if possible, the aircraft’s flight recorders.
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