After twelve hours of deep-sea search operations, Pakistan Navy and PMSA forces have located the debris field of the missing Boeing 737 in the Arabian Sea. The five men aboard have not been found. This is everything confirmed as of July 9, 2026.
The search is no longer about finding an aircraft. It is now about finding five men.
Twelve hours after Flight KTA1732 vanished from radar on the night of July 7, the Pakistan Airports Authority confirmed that the Pakistan Navy and the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency had successfully located and identified the wreckage of the K2 Airways Boeing 737-400 cargo aircraft. The debris field was recovered approximately 53 nautical miles south of Ormara — a coastal town in Balochistan province, situated roughly 140 nautical miles west of Karachi, where the Gulf of Oman meets the northern Arabian Sea.
The wreckage has been found. The crew has not.
“Various airborne and seaborne assets were employed by PN and PMSA to locate the wreckage,” the Pakistan Airports Authority confirmed in an official statement. “Efforts are underway to find the missing crew members. Further details will follow as the Search and Rescue operation progresses.“
The Five Men Aboard
For the first time since the aircraft disappeared, K2 Airways officially released the identities of the five crew members who were aboard Flight KTA1732.
Captain Mohammad Rizwan Idrees was the Pilot in Command. First Officer Faisal Mehmood occupied the right seat. Muhammad Toufique Khan served as Load Master. Engineers Arif Siddiqui and Mohammad Hamid rounded out the five-man crew.
In a statement posted to its LinkedIn page, K2 Airways confirmed their identities and added: “We continue to pray, earnestly, for the safety of our colleagues.”
All five men are Pakistani nationals. All five remain unaccounted for as search assets continue to comb the waters around the debris site south of Ormara.
The Final Transmission — A Detail That Changes the Picture
One piece of information that has emerged in the hours since wreckage was confirmed carries significant investigative weight.
According to Newsweek’s reporting, the final transmission from the pilot stated that the aircraft had begun “rolling or floating.” In aviation terminology, rolling refers to the banking motion of an aircraft around its longitudinal axis — an uncontrolled roll being one of the most dangerous situations a crew can face at any altitude. The use of that specific language in a final transmission, combined with the ADS-B telemetry profile already documented, now paints a more complete — and more alarming — picture of what those last three minutes looked like inside the cockpit.
The sequence, now confirmed across multiple data sources, shows the aircraft cruising normally at 35,000 feet until 16:18 UTC. One minute later, it dropped sharply to 29,475 feet. It then climbed back to a peak of 36,650 feet. The final two recorded altitude readings were 34,575 feet at 16:20:15 UTC, and 1,100 feet at 16:21:59 UTC. That final data point showed a descent rate of −22,400 feet per minute at an airspeed of approximately 114 knots.
The pilot’s report of rolling, combined with the confirmed altitude oscillation from 29,475 feet to 36,650 feet and back to 34,575 feet before the terminal plunge, is consistent with an aircraft in a developing loss-of-control event — where the crew may have over-corrected from an initial upset, sending the aircraft into a pitch-up stall before it entered its final, unrecoverable descent.
What the Wreckage Location Tells Investigators
The confirmed debris site — 53 nautical miles south of Ormara — is notably further from Karachi than the initial radar loss-of-contact position suggested.
The Pakistan Airports Authority had initially confirmed radar contact was lost approximately 155 nautical miles west of Karachi. Ormara itself sits roughly 140 nautical miles west-northwest of Karachi. The wreckage position, 53 nautical miles south of Ormara, places the debris field in deep open water well south of the Balochistan coastline.
For investigators, this geographic data point will be critical. The distance between where radar contact was lost and where wreckage was found helps establish the aircraft’s final flight path and speed in its terminal phase — information that will be cross-referenced against the ADS-B telemetry to reconstruct what happened between 16:21 UTC and impact.
It also defines the next challenge. The water in that area of the northern Arabian Sea is deep. Locating the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder — the black boxes that hold the definitive record of every system state and every word spoken in the cockpit — will require underwater search assets capable of operating at significant depth.
The Search Assets Now on Scene
The multi-agency operation deployed to find KTA1732 represents one of the more substantial naval and aviation search efforts Pakistan has mounted in recent years.
PNS Zulfiqar, the Pakistan Navy’s F-22P guided-missile frigate, was diverted directly into the search coordinates from the moment contact was lost. A Pakistan Air Force Saab 2000 Erieye airborne early warning aircraft and a Pakistan Navy ATR-72 maritime patrol plane provided aerial coverage. M.V. Lahore, a commercial vessel operated by the Pakistan National Shipping Corporation, was also deployed to the search zone — expanding the surface-coverage footprint beyond purely military assets.
It was this combination of naval, air force, maritime agency, and commercial shipping assets working in coordination that allowed wreckage to be located within twelve hours of the aircraft’s disappearance. That response timeline is significant. In open-ocean search operations of this nature, twelve hours to confirmed debris location is a meaningful operational success — one that now gives investigators a defined search zone for the next and far more difficult phase: locating the black boxes on the seabed.
Prime Minister and President Both Issue Statements
The scale of the national response extended to Pakistan’s highest political offices.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif confirmed in a public statement that the aircraft had crashed into the Arabian Sea, expressing what he described as “deep sorrow, grief, and regret over the tragic incident.” He directed the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority, Pakistan Navy, and Pakistan Air Force to intensify search and rescue operations and utilise all available resources in the effort.
President Asif Ali Zardari expressed deep concern and grief over the loss, offering prayers for the safety of the crew and extending condolences to their families.
K2 Airways confirmed it is fully cooperating with the Pakistan Civil Aviation Authority and all relevant government agencies. The airline has not commented publicly on the possible cause of the accident.
The Aircraft’s Final Numbers
Aviation Week’s Fleet Discovery data adds a precise technical footnote to AP-BOI’s history that is relevant to the investigation.
The 27-year-old Boeing 737-400 had accumulated approximately 46,658 flight hours and 27,678 cycles across its operational life. It entered service with Aeroflot in 1998, moved to Garuda Indonesia in 2004, was converted to a freighter configuration in 2011, and passed through several subsequent owners and periods of storage before joining K2 Airways in April 2024.
Cycle count — the number of times an aircraft has completed a pressurisation cycle through takeoff and landing — is one of the primary metrics through which an airframe’s structural condition is assessed. At 27,678 cycles on a 27-year-old airframe, AP-BOI was operating in the upper range of what older converted freighters typically accumulate before retirement. Whether that history is relevant to what happened on the night of July 7 is a question only the investigation can answer.
Analyst’s Take
The confirmation of wreckage, the identification of the crew by name, and the detail of the pilot’s final transmission describing a rolling or floating aircraft together mark a significant shift in what this story is.
It is no longer a search for a missing plane. It is a crash investigation — and the recovery of five crew members — with a defined debris field, a documented telemetry trail, and a sequence of events that investigators can now begin to reconstruct with increasing precision.
The next critical milestone is the recovery of the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder from the seabed south of Ormara. Without those devices, the cause of the accident remains a matter of informed inference from ADS-B data and partial crew communications. With them, the precise sequence of system failures, crew inputs, and aerodynamic events across those final three minutes becomes recoverable.
Captain Mohammad Rizwan Idrees, First Officer Faisal Mehmood, Load Master Muhammad Toufique Khan, Engineer Arif Siddiqui, and Engineer Mohammad Hamid boarded Flight KTA1732 for a routine cargo run from Sharjah to Karachi. Their families are waiting.
The Arabian Sea south of Ormara holds the answers. The question now is how long it takes to bring them to the surface.