A K2 Airways cargo jet carrying five crew members vanished from radar west of Karachi after reporting a navigational system issue late on Tuesday night, and a search and rescue operation was launched at sea. The Pakistan Airports Authority said the aircraft was still being searched for as multiple agencies moved into the area.
The flight was a Boeing 737 cargo service from Sharjah to Karachi. At 2118 PST, it reported the problem to the Karachi Area Control Centre, which guided the aircraft before radar showed it at 2121 PST rapidly descending with a sharp change in heading. Contact and communication were then lost about 155 nautical miles west of Karachi, leaving its fate unconfirmed and pushing the search into a race against time.
That immediate uncertainty is why the case has drawn so much attention. Flightradar said preliminary ADS-B data indicate a possible crash, while the Pakistan Airports Authority described a live search operation still underway. Those two accounts point in the same direction, but they stop short of the one fact that matters most: whether the aircraft is still afloat, broken apart, or already on the sea floor.
The response reflects the scale of the concern. A rescue coordination centre was activated, the Pakistan Navy dispatched PNS Zulfiqar, a Pakistan Air Force SAAB and a Pakistan Navy ATR took off to join the operation, and the Pakistan National Shipping Corporation deployed Lahore. With air, naval and commercial assets now searching the same stretch of sea, the operation has moved from a routine emergency call to a coordinated hunt for a missing aircraft.
The aircraft itself has a long and unusual history. -BOI is a Boeing 737-4M0(BDSF) that began service with K2 Airways in 2024, after earlier flying as a passenger aircraft with Aeroflot in 1999 and Garuda Indonesia in 2004. It was converted to a freighter in 2012 and later operated by TNT Airways and ASL Airlines, a background that matters now only because the jet that disappeared off Karachi was not a new aircraft, but one with years of service behind it.
For now, the search is the story. The aircraft’s last known path points to a rapid descent and a possible crash, but the official position remains that the operation is active and the outcome is still unknown.
