Pakistan deployed aircraft and a military ship on Wednesday to locate a cargo plane that lost contact with air traffic control as it was approaching Karachi on Tuesday night, according to the country’s military and aviation authorities.
The Pakistan-registered plane, a Boeing 737, was flying from Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates to Karachi when it reported a navigation issue shortly after 9 p.m. local time, according to Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority.
The plane went into a steep descent three minutes later, the authority said in a statement, and vanished in the Arabian Sea, according to flight-tracking data.
K2 Airways, the Karachi-based private airline operating the plane, said five crew members were on board. “We continue to pray, earnestly, for the safety of our colleagues,” it said in a statement.
The cause of the plane’s disappearance and the fate of the crew remained unknown as of Wednesday morning.
The plane was about 155 nautical miles west of Karachi when it lost contact with air traffic control, Pakistan’s Civil Aviation Authority said.
Data from Flightradar24, a flight tracking service, shows the plane flying from the United Arab Emirates toward Pakistan over the Gulf of Oman and later losing 5,000 feet of altitude in about a minute. It gained altitude again, according to the data, before disappearing as it neared Karachi.
The last data point available on Flightradar24 showed the plane at 1,100 feet above sea level and plunging vertically at 22,400 feet per minute — about 255 miles per hour.
The last major air disaster in Pakistan was in 2020, when 97 people died when an Airbus A320 crashed into a residential area of Karachi after a failed attempt to land at the city’s airport. In 2016, a plane operated by Pakistan’s national airline burst into flames after one of its two engines failed, killing 48 people.
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