Thirteen days. That’s how long it’s been since a K2 Airways cargo jet disappeared from radar near Ormara and crashed into the Arabian Sea on July 7. The tail section has been found. A bag belonging to one of the crew has been recovered. The crew themselves, the fuselage, the engines, and the two flight recorders that could explain what happened — all of it remains somewhere on a seabed nearly three kilometers below the surface.
Pakistan is now considering whether it needs to call in outside help. The Bureau of Aircraft Safety Investigation has proposed bringing in international deep-sea salvage companies with the technical expertise to reach an aircraft at that depth. The government is reviewing the proposal. No decision has been publicly confirmed. And the clock is running.
Why 3,000 Meters Changes Everything
The depth is the central problem, and it’s worth understanding why.
Most underwater search and recovery operations — the kind that Pakistan’s Navy and Pakistan Maritime Security Agency have been conducting near Ormara since the crash — rely on standard naval assets. Those assets work well in shallower coastal waters. At nearly 3,000 meters, standard dive equipment and most naval search tools are simply out of range.
Recovering an aircraft from that depth requires remotely operated underwater vehicles equipped with sonar, cameras, and manipulator arms capable of operating at extreme pressure — the kind of specialized hardware that a small number of international salvage companies maintain and that most national navies, including Pakistan’s, don’t own.
That’s why BASI is proposing foreign assistance. This isn’t an admission of failure by the Pakistan Navy, which has been conducting a sustained search operation for nearly two weeks. It’s a recognition that the specific technical challenge of deep-sea aircraft recovery is genuinely specialized, and that going it alone risks missing the window entirely.
The Beacon Window Is Closing
Aviation accident investigators treat the first 30 days after a crash as the critical window for locating flight recorders. Both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder are equipped with Underwater Locator Beacons — small acoustic transmitters that ping at 37.5 kHz once activated by water immersion. The beacons are designed to transmit continuously for at least 30 days.
The K2 Airways crash happened on July 7. Today is July 20. Thirteen days remain before the beacon signals begin to weaken and eventually stop entirely.
If the wreckage isn’t localized within that window, finding the recorders becomes significantly harder. The acoustic signals are the primary tool for pinpointing exact location — without them, salvage teams are searching a large area of open ocean floor at 3,000 meters with no acoustic guide. It has been done, but it takes considerably longer, considerably more equipment, and considerably more expense.
The families of the crew understand this timeline and have been urging the government to accelerate its decision on international assistance, specifically because of the beacon window. A separate petition has also been submitted through Pakistan’s Senate portal.
What’s Actually Been Recovered So Far
Search teams have retrieved two items from the crash site: the aircraft’s tail section and a bag belonging to engineer Hamid, one of the five crew members who were aboard the flight.
The five missing crew are Captain Muhammad Rizwan Idris, First Officer Faisal Mahmood Jatoi, Flight Engineers Muhammad Hamid and Muhammad Arif Siddiqui, and Aircraft Loader Muhammad Taufiq Khan. None of them have been found. The tail section provides some evidence of where the aircraft entered the water and the general orientation of impact, but the critical information — what was happening in the cockpit in the final minutes — is locked inside the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder that remain on the seabed.
The crew themselves have not been found. K2 Airways has not commented publicly on the search. The airline, which lost its only aircraft in the crash, has had its office sealed by authorities, according to earlier reporting.
The Navigation System Question
Alongside the salvage question, there’s a separate technical detail that families have raised and aviation experts are now examining.
The crew radioed Karachi Area Control Centre at 9:18 PM to report a navigation system issue. Controllers began providing guidance. Three minutes later, at 9:21 PM, radar showed the aircraft descending rapidly with a sharp heading change. Contact was lost. What Flightradar24’s ADS-B data captured in those final minutes is extraordinary: the aircraft dropped approximately 5,000 feet in less than a minute, then climbed back around 6,000 feet in just 30 seconds, before entering a catastrophic final dive from 36,550 feet. The last data point recorded the aircraft at 1,100 feet above the sea, descending at 22,400 feet per minute — roughly 250 miles per hour, straight down.
That telemetry pattern makes the navigation system question more urgent, not less. A 737 doesn’t behave that way unless something has gone catastrophically wrong with either the aircraft’s control systems or the flight crew’s ability to understand what the aircraft was doing.
According to Yashib Rizwan, the son of Captain Rizwan Idris, one of the aircraft’s two Inertial Reference Units was replaced in Sharjah before the flight departed. That replacement wasn’t a routine quick swap — the aircraft had been grounded in Sharjah for approximately ten days while the crew waited for the specific component to arrive from the United States, according to Ghulam Nabi, the father-in-law of co-pilot Faisal Jatoi. The plane departed for Karachi only after the replacement part finally arrived and the IRU was installed.
An IRU is a core navigation component — it tracks the aircraft’s position, orientation, and velocity, providing pilots with the data they need to know exactly where they are and which way they’re pointing, particularly when visual references aren’t available.
Former US National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia has said that problems with an IRU could affect a pilot’s ability to determine an aircraft’s position and orientation, particularly during night flights over open water — which is exactly the conditions the K2 Airways cargo jet was operating in.
Aviation experts are careful to add the appropriate caveat: aircraft accidents are rarely caused by a single factor, and investigators have not established any link between the IRU replacement and the crash. The flight data recorder is the tool that would answer definitively what, if anything, was wrong with the navigation system in the final moments of the flight. Which is exactly why finding it matters so much.
The Air France 447 Comparison
Aviation experts cited in coverage of this crash have drawn a direct parallel to Air France Flight 447, which disappeared over the South Atlantic on June 1, 2009, while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
That aircraft crashed in water more than 3,000 meters deep. For nearly two years, the main wreckage and the flight recorders could not be found. It required a sustained multinational search effort — involving France, Brazil, the United States, and specialized private salvage contractors — before the black boxes were finally recovered in April 2011, nearly two years after the crash.
The Air France 447 comparison isn’t meant to suggest this investigation will take two years. It’s meant to illustrate two things: that recovering aircraft from this depth is genuinely solvable with the right technology and international cooperation, and that doing it without specialized deep-sea salvage capability is not a realistic option.
The international collaboration that eventually found Air France 447 succeeded because it started early, combined state resources with private technical expertise, and treated the acoustic beacon window as the primary organizing constraint. Pakistan’s current deliberation over whether to seek foreign help is taking place against exactly that same backdrop — a closing window, a recoverable situation, and a decision that needs to be made quickly enough to matter.
What Happens Next
The government has not publicly confirmed whether it will seek foreign assistance. The families of the crew are waiting for an answer through the Prime Minister’s Portal, where a human rights organization representative has been assigned to coordinate with them under the portal’s standard mechanism.
The Pakistan Navy and Pakistan Maritime Security Agency continue their coordinated search near Ormara in the meantime. Whether that search expands to include international deep-sea salvage assets will depend on the government’s decision — and the sooner that decision comes, the more of the 30-day beacon window remains usable.
At 3,000 meters, the Arabian Sea doesn’t give up its secrets easily. But the technology to find them exists. Whether Pakistan brings it in time is now a question of days, not weeks.