A cargo plane with five people on board went missing while flying over the Arabian Sea on Tuesday.
The K2 Airways Boeing 737 disappeared from radar about 80 minutes into its two-hour flight from Sharjah, UAE, to Karachi, Pakistan.
Three minutes earlier, the pilots reported a “navigational system issue,” and were guided by air traffic control in Karachi, the Pakistan Airports Authority said in an X post.
Data from Flightradar24 appears to show it dropped in altitude, climbed, and then suddenly plunged at a rate of 22,400 feet per minute.
At altitude, an airliner typically does not descend faster than 3,000 feet per minute.
A search-and-rescue operation is being conducted at sea by various agencies, the Pakistan Airports Authority said.
K2 Airways, a Karachi-based cargo airline, said in a Facebook post that it was cooperating with government agencies for the investigation, and continued to “pray, earnestly, for the safety of our colleagues.”
It shared the names of five crew members, including a pilot, a first officer, a load master, and two engineers.
According to its website, the missing 737 was the only airplane in its fleet.
Boeing did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent outside regular US working hours.
Registered as AP-BOI, the aircraft had been flying for over 27 years. It first carried passengers for Russia’s Aeroflot in 1999. In 2012, it was converted to a freighter and was operated by several carriers over the years.
Representatives for K2 Airways and the Pakistan Airports Authority did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Pakistan has witnessed some severe plane crashes in the past two decades. In 2020, an Airbus A320, operated by Pakistan International Airlines, crashed near Jinnah International Airport in Karachi, killing 98 people on board.
In 2019, a Pakistan Army military plane crashed into a city in the country’s northern city of Rawalpindi, killing five crew members and 13 civilians on the ground.
And in 2010, an Airblue flight crashed north of the capital, Islamabad, killing more than 150 people on board.
