A picture of a K2 Airways plane. — K2 AIRWAYS WEBSITE
KARACHI:
Pakistani authorities are considering engaging foreign deep-sea salvage specialists to help recover the missing K2 Airways cargo plane that crashed in the Arabian Sea off the coast of Ormara, as efforts continue to locate the crew, fuselage, engines and plane’s black box.
According to sources, the Bureau of Aircraft Safety Investigation, which is leading the probe into the crash, has suggested to the government that internationally experienced salvage companies should be engaged for the technically complex deep-sea recovery.
Following the government’s deliberations, cooperation with specialized international salvage organizations is expected to pave the way for an advanced underwater recovery effort.
The search operation continued on Sunday, with the Pakistan Navy and the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency maintaining coordinated operations in the crash site off the coast of Balochistan near Ormara.
Sources said it has been decided to continue the search operation on a sustained basis with the help of naval assets deployed in the area.
So far, search teams have recovered the plane’s tail section and a bag belonging to engineer Hamid, while efforts to locate the crew, fuselage, engines and the plane’s black box are still ongoing.
Relatives are calling for an international search effort to find the flight recorders to determine the cause.
The affected families have also received an official response through the Prime Minister’s portal after submitting a request. Under the mechanism of the portal, a representative of a human rights organization in Karachi has been appointed to coordinate with and assist the affected families.
The families had also submitted a petition regarding the crash through the Senate of Pakistan portal.
Debris from the K2 Airways cargo ship was found 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 that would likely need foreign assistance, according to aviation experts familiar with deep-water crashes such as Air France 447 in 2009.
The locator beacons on the 27-year-old plane were designed to send pings for only 30 days. Recovery of recorders could show whether a navigation system problem reported shortly before the crash was linked to a navigation component that relatives say was replaced before the flight.
Authorities have given no public update on the search for a week, and an industrial company with underwater search expertise told Reuters it had not heard of any requests from them for assistance from foreign companies or navies.
“The search must continue and whatever resources can be deployed, locally and internationally, they should be deployed,” Yashib Rizwan, Captain Rizwan Idris’s eldest son, told Reuters. “For us, a transparent investigation is the key”.
Engineer Muhammad Arif Siddiqui’s son, Abdur Rafay Siddiqui, also asked for international assistance if needed.
Both families have held funeral prayers after losing hope that the bodies would be recovered.
The government has not responded to questions about whether it will seek foreign assistance to search for the plane.
K2, which lost its only aircraft in the crash, has not responded to requests for comment.
One of the plane’s two inertial reference units (IRUs), which provide information about the plane’s position, speed and orientation to the cockpit displays, was replaced in Sharjah, the captain’s son Yashib Rizwan said.
“If you have a problem with your IRU, you just can’t rely on the instruments,” said John Goglia, a former member of the US National Transportation Safety Board, adding that pilots flying at night over the ocean without visual references can struggle to determine the plane’s orientation.
Aircraft accidents are usually caused by several factors, and it remains unclear whether the replacement of the IRU is related to the crash.
A malfunction in the inertial reference system contributed to the 2007 Adam Air crash in Indonesia, where investigators found that the pilots became fixated on troubleshooting erroneous information, failed to notice a steep right bank, and lost control before the plane crashed into the sea, killing all 102 people on board.
Pings from Adam Air’s black boxes were discovered about three weeks after the crash in a search aided by the US Navy, but recovering the recorders from about 2,000m of water took a months-long, multimillion-dollar effort using a specialized remotely operated vehicle.
US aviation expert Todd Curtis said on the “Flight Safety Detectives” podcast that Pakistan was unlikely to undertake a similar recovery operation unless there was a compelling reason, as the K2 aircraft was an aging cargo jet rather than a passenger model in current production. (With input from Reuters)
