Search on for Boeing 737 That Vanished in Flight

A Pakistan-registered Boeing 737 cargo plane with five crew members on board vanished from radar Tuesday night after the pilots reported a navigation problem while heading from the UAE to Karachi, aviation officials said. Local air traffic control began assisting the plane at 9:18pm, but three minutes later, radar systems captured a rapid descent and communication ceased.

Early tracking data suggests the 27-year-old jet, operated by K2 Airways, may have gone down in the Arabian Sea some 175 miles from Karachi after dramatic swings in altitude and a final, extremely rapid descent, per data from Flightradar24 cited by Reuters. It shows the plane dropped 5,000 feet in less than a minute, regained 6,000 feet in a 30-second surge, then began a near-vertical descent from 36,550 feet. A multi-agency search-and-rescue effort is underway.

The AP quotes aviation expert Imran Aslam as telling local ARY News that in the event an aircraft suffers an engine failure, it would normally glide rather than plunge. "I still cannot understand how the plane went down so abruptly instead of gliding," he said. Al Jazeera reports that if the crash is confirmed, it will be Pakistan's first major civilian air disaster since the May 2020 crash of a Pakistan International Airlines plane just shy of a runway in Karachi; 97 of the 99 people on board were killed.