Finding the black boxes requires an expensive underwater search that will likely need foreign assistance
Yashib Rizwan, 33, holds a cellphone showing a photo of his father, Captain Muhammad Rizwan Idris, 62, the late pilot of the K2 Airways Boeing 737 cargo plane 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 in the Arabian Sea off Pakistan last week are calling for an international search effort to find the flight recorders to determine the cause.
Debris from the cargo ship K2 Airways 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 not given a public update on the search for a week, and an industry 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,” said Yashib Rizwan, the eldest son of Captain Rizwan Idris. Reuters. “For us, a transparent investigation is the key”.
Engineer Muhammad Arif Siddiqui’s son, Abdur Rafay Siddiqui, also called 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.
Problem with the navigation system
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 Pakistan Airports Authority said last week.
Local air traffic control tried to guide it, but three minutes later radar systems showed the plane was descending rapidly and communications were lost, the authority said.
Flightradar24 data showed the plane plummeted about 5,000 feet in less than a minute, climbed about 6,000 feet in 30 seconds and then went into 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 failure, said Ghulam Nabi, father-in-law of co-pilot Faisal Jatoi.
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 fixed 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.
American aviation expert Todd Curtis said of “Aviation security 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.
