Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) and Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to mount an intensive search and rescue operation for a Boeing 737-400 cargo plane that disappeared over the Arabian Sea on Tuesday night.
The plane was operated by a private cargo company called K2 Airways, based in Karachi. The airline is relatively young, having received its charter from the Pakistani government in 2018, and it operates only that single 27-year-old cargo plane, which it acquired in December 2024.
According to the Pakistan Airports Authority (PAA), the plane took off from the city of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Tuesday, bound for Karachi. Five crew members were on board.
The plane, designated K2 Airways Flight 1732, was approaching Pakistani airspace at 9:19 p.m. local time when it reported a “navigation system problem.”
Local air traffic controllers attempted to guide the plane, but about three minutes later, radar showed it descending rapidly, and contact was lost. The plane was about 155 nautical miles west of Karachi when it disappeared.
A subsequent review of flight tracking data showed the plane dropping almost 5,000 feet in less than a minute, then climbing 6,000 feet in 30 seconds, and finally beginning what looked like a terminal dive from 36,550 feet.
The final data transmission from the plane indicated an altitude of just 1,100 feet — and it was descending at 22,400 feet per minute. The final radio transmission from the pilot said the plane was “rolling or floating,” terms which could indicate both a problem with maintaining level flight and problems with an emergency landing attempt.
The PAA said on Wednesday that a massive search and rescue effort was underway, on the orders of Prime Minister Sharif, including Pakistani air and naval military forces. After 12 hours of searching, some wreckage was recovered about 53 nautical miles from the coastal town of Ormara in Pakistan’s province of Balochistan.
As of Wednesday afternoon, no members of the plane’s crew had been found, either alive or dead. Both Sharif and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari held out hope for rescue, but also extended their “heartfelt condolences” to the families of the missing.
Australia’s News.com noted that if the crew members are dead, it will mark Pakistan’s first fatal air crash since 2020, when 97 people died in the crash of a passenger jet in Karachi. That crash was blamed on the pilots becoming distracted by a conversation over the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
Much attention in the Flight 1732 crisis has been focused on the plane and its service history. The 737-400 was initially purchased in 1999 by Russia’s Aeroflot, which used it as a passenger aircraft. It was later transferred to Indonesia’s Garuda Indonesia airline and then converted to a cargo plane by Belgium’s TNT Airways in 2012.
According to flight records, the plane was taken out of service in June 2023, spent about ten months parked in France, and was then briefly used by an Irish leasing company called AerCap. The plane went back into storage for six months, first in Indonesia and then in Karachi, before it was acquired by K2 Airways in December 2024. None of the service history released thus far has included any red flags about severe mechanical or electronic problems.
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