Finding the black boxes requires costly underwater search likely to require foreign assistance
Yashib Rizwan, 33, holds a cellphone showing a photo of his father, Captain Muhammad Rizwan Idris, 62, former pilot of the K2 Airways Boeing 737 freighter that crashed into the Arabian Sea, during an interview with Reuters at his home in Karachi, Pakistan, July 16, 2026 — Reuters
Relatives of the five crew members aboard a Boeing 737 cargo plane that crashed into the Arabian Sea off Pakistan last week are calling for an international search effort to find the flight recorders and determine the cause.
Debris from the K2 Airways cargo ship was recovered shortly after the July 7 crash, but the water in the area is about 3,000 meters deep.
Finding the “black boxes” would require a costly underwater search likely to require foreign assistance, according to aviation experts familiar with deep-water accidents such as that of the Air France 447 in 2009.
The 27-year-old plane’s tracking beacons were designed to transmit pings for only 30 days. Recovery of the recorders could show whether a navigation system problem reported shortly before the crash was related to a navigation component that relatives say had been replaced before the flight.
Authorities have not provided any public updates on the search for a week, and an industrial company with expertise in underwater searches said Reuters she is not aware of any requests for assistance from foreign companies or navies on their part.
“The search must continue and all resources that can be deployed, locally and internationally, must be deployed,” said Yashib Rizwan, the eldest son of Captain Rizwan Idris. Reuters. “For us, a transparent investigation is essential.”
Engineer Muhammad Arif Siddiqui’s son, Abdur Rafay Siddiqui, also called for international help if necessary.
Both families held funeral prayers after losing hope that the bodies would be found.
The government did not respond to questions about whether it would seek foreign help in searching for the plane.
K2, which lost its only plane in the crash, did not respond to requests for comment.
Navigation system problem
The pilots reported a navigation system problem at 9:18 p.m. Pakistan time while flying to Karachi from Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, the Airports Authority of Pakistan said last week.
Local air traffic control tried to guide it, but three minutes later radar systems showed the plane was descending rapidly and communication was lost, authorities said.
Data from Flightradar24 showed the plane plunged about 5,000 feet in less than a minute, climbed about 6,000 feet in 30 seconds, then entered a catastrophic dive from 36,550 feet.
The plane spent about 10 days in Sharjah before the flight while the pilots waited for a spare part from the United States after a maintenance problem, said Ghulam Nabi, the father-in-law of co-pilot Faisal Jatoi.
One of the plane’s two inertial reference units (IRUs), which transmit information about the plane’s position, speed and orientation to the cockpit displays, was replaced in Sharjah, said the captain’s son, Yashib Rizwan.
“If you have a problem with your IRU, you just can’t rely on the instruments,” said John Goglia, a former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, adding that pilots flying at night over the ocean without visual references might have trouble determining the plane’s orientation.
Airplane accidents are usually caused by several factors, and it remains unclear whether IRU replacement is related to the accident.
A malfunction in the inertial reference system contributed to the Adam Air crash in Indonesia in 2007, where investigators found the pilots became obsessed with troubleshooting faulty information, failed to notice a steep right bank and lost control before the plane plunged into the sea, killing all 102 people on board.
Pings from Adam Air’s black boxes were detected about three weeks after the accident during a search aided by the US Navy, but recovering the recorders from about 2,000 m of water required a multi-million dollar effort over several months using a specialized remotely operated vehicle.
American aviation expert Todd Curtis said of the “Flight Safety Detectives“Pakistan is unlikely to mount a similar recovery operation unless there is a compelling reason, given that the K2 aircraft was an aging cargo aircraft rather than a current production passenger model.
