What happened
A K2 Airways Boeing 737-400 cargo aircraft flying from Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates to Karachi disappeared from radar over the Arabian Sea late on Tuesday 7 July 2026, prompting a multi-agency search and rescue operation, aviation officials and the airline said.
The Pakistan Airports Authority (PAA) said the aircraft reported a navigational system issue at about 9:18pm and was guided by the Karachi Area Control Centre. At 9:21pm the aircraft was observed on radar descending rapidly and making a sharp change of heading before radar contact and communication were lost about 287 kilometres west of Karachi, the authority said. The flight-tracking service Flightradar24 said preliminary data showed a loss of altitude, a climb and then a second, sudden loss of altitude, with the final data point placing the aircraft at 1,100 feet with a reported vertical rate of minus 22,400 feet per minute.
The crew and the search
K2 Airways said five crew members were on board: pilot Rizwan Idrees, first officer Faisal Mahmood, loadmaster Taufiq Khan, and engineers Zarif Siddiqui and Muhammad Hamid. The airline said the aircraft had been in Sharjah for repairs and was on a ferry flight back to Karachi.
The Rescue Coordination Centre was activated and the Pakistan Navy deployed the warships PNS Zulfiqar and PNS Hunain, while a Pakistan Air Force Saab 2000 airborne early warning aircraft and a navy ATR aircraft joined the aerial search, according to officials and the Samaa news channel. A Pakistan National Shipping Corporation vessel, Lahore, and the Maritime Security Agency assisted at sea, and the Edhi Foundation dispatched a naval team with a light aircraft.
What followed
The wreckage of the 27-year-old Boeing 737 was located the following day in the Arabian Sea off Ormara on Pakistan’s southern coast after a search of about 12 hours in rough monsoon seas, the navy and the maritime rescue agency said. The five crew members were still missing at that point and efforts to find them continued, officials said. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif expressed his condolences to the families of the crew.
The Bureau of Air Safety Investigation is to investigate the cause of the crash. The last major jetliner accident at Karachi was the May 2020 crash of a Pakistan International Airlines aircraft that killed all but one of the 99 people on board, a disaster attributed in a government report to human error by the pilots and air traffic control.
Why it matters
The disappearance of a cargo aircraft on a routine positioning flight focused attention on aviation safety in Pakistan’s busiest air corridor and on the hazards of search and rescue in the monsoon-season Arabian Sea. The detailed radar and flight-tracking data made public within hours gave investigators an unusually early record of the aircraft’s final minutes.
What is still uncertain
At the time of the reports reviewed here the cause of the crash had not been established and the fate of the five crew members had not been confirmed. Accounts of the sequence of the navigation fault, the aircraft’s final manoeuvres and the number and roles of those on board came from the airline, the airports authority, unnamed aviation sources and flight-tracking data, and differed in some details. Those discrepancies are as carried by the cited sources rather than independently resolved here.
Sources & reporting notes
This is a summary of published reporting, not independent reporting. Details are as carried by the cited sources, which were reviewed on 2026-07-08.
- Samaa TV — "Pakistan's cargo plane crashes near Karachi; 5 on board"7 July 2026 · The crew names, the Sharjah repairs, the last radio contact and the naval and air search.
- Dawn — "Cargo plane disappears from radar over Arabian Sea off Karachi"8 July 2026 · The PAA account of the navigational fault, the radar track and the final Flightradar24 data.
- DW — "Pakistan: Rescuers find wreckage of crashed cargo plane"8 July 2026 · Wreckage found off Ormara, the 12-hour search and the prime minister's condolences.
