Finding the black boxes requires an expensive underwater search that will likely need foreign help
Yashib Rizwan, 33, holds a mobile phone displaying a photo of his father, Captain Muhammad Rizwan Idris, 62, the late pilot of the K2 Airways Boeing 737 cargo plane that crashed in 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 urging an international search effort to find flight recorders to determine the cause.
The wreckage of the K2 Airways freighter was recovered shortly after the July 7 accident, 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 require foreign help, according to aviation experts familiar with deep-water accidents like the Air France 447 crash in 2009.
The locator beacons on the 27-year-old plane 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 was replaced before the flight.
Authorities have not provided any public updates on the search for a week, and an industrial company with experience in underwater searches said Reuters he had not heard of any requests for assistance from foreign companies or navies.
“The search has to 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 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 help to search for the plane.
K2, which lost its only plane in the crash, did not respond 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 attempted to guide it, but three minutes later, radar systems showed the plane descending rapidly and communication was lost, the authority said.
Data from Flightradar24 showed that the plane sank about 5,000 feet in less than a minute, climbed about 6,000 feet in 30 seconds, and then entered a catastrophic plunge from 36,550 feet.
The plane spent about 10 days in Sharjah before the flight while the pilots waited for a replacement 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 feed information about the plane’s position, speed and orientation to cockpit displays, was replaced in Sharjah, said the captain’s son, Yashib Rizwan.
“If you have a problem with your IRU, you simply can’t trust 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 could have difficulty determining the aircraft’s orientation.
Airplane accidents are usually caused by multiple factors and it is still unclear whether the replacement of the IRU is related to the accident.
An inertial reference system malfunction contributed to the 2007 Adam Air crash in Indonesia, where investigators found that the pilots became obsessed with troubleshooting misinformation, 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 crash in a search aided by the US Navy, but recovering the recorders from about 2,000m of water required a multi-million dollar effort lasting months using a specialized remotely operated vehicle.
American aviation expert Todd Curtis said in the “Flight Safety Detectivespodcast that Pakistan was unlikely to mount a similar recovery operation unless there was a compelling reason, given that the K2 aircraft was an older cargo plane rather than a current production passenger model.
