Pakistan: Plane with 5 onboard loses contact off Karachi
July 7, 2026
A Boeing 737 cargo plane with five crew members on board lost contact with air traffic control on Tuesday night, Pakistani aviation authorities said.
The aircraft had reported a technical problem while on its way from Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to Karachi. The incident has triggered search and rescue operations.
Pakistan Airport Authority (PAA) said radar systems showed the aircraft descending rapidly and communication was lost.
According to global flight-tracking service, Flightradar24.com, preliminary data sent from the plane "indicated a loss of altitude, followed by a climb, and then a second, sudden and dramatic loss of altitude."
The last transmitted data point placed the aircraft at 1,100 feet (335 meters) above sea level, with a vertical rate of minus 22,400 feet per minute, which is considred to be an extremely steep and abnormal rate of descent.
The plane was flying over the Arabian Sea near Ormara in Balochistan, Pakistan, when it went missing, according to local media Geo News.
Passenger plane converted to cargo
The PAA said a rescue coordination center has been activated and a search effort launched at sea to locate the missing aircraft has been deployed.
The aircraft was operated by K2 Airways, a private cargo airline in Pakistan that operates scheduled and charter flights domestically and internationally.
Formerly, the aircraft was a passenger plane, manufactured in 1999, which had been operated by Aeroflot and Garuda Indonesia before being converted to a cargo configuration in 2012.
The last time a jetliner accident took place in Karachi was in May 2020 when a Pakistani plane carrying 98 people crashed in a crowded neighborhood near the airport, after an apparent engine failure during landing.
Pakistan released a report concluded that the crash, in which all but one of the passengers perished, was caused by human error from the pilot, the co-pilot and air traffic control.
Edited by: Wesley Dockery
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