A massive rescue operation is underway off the coast of Pakistan after the Pakistani navy and air force located underwater wreckage of the missing K2 Airways Boeing 737-400 cargo plane.
The incident occurred in the Arabian Sea, about 53 nautical miles south of the port of Ormara, during an approach to land in Karachi.
Flight KTA1732 was flying an international route from Sharjah (UAE) to Karachi with a five-member Pakistani crew on board. At 9:18 p.m. local time, the pilots reported a serious problem with the navigation system. Minutes later, controllers lost all radio contact with the plane.
Data from the global tracking platform Flightradar24 shows the plane's anomalous and dramatic behavior in its final minutes. It initially fell 5,000 feet in less than a minute, then climbed sharply 6,000 feet in 30 seconds before entering a steep final dive from 36,550 feet at a speed of 13,000 feet per minute.
The airline identified the missing crew members as two pilots, two flight engineers and a loader. Pakistan's Prime Minister, Shehbaz Sharif, expressed condolences to the families and ordered the mobilization of all state resources to find them. According to experts, deep-sea equipment will be needed to extract the main part of the fuselage. This is the first major plane crash in the country since 2020.