Pakistan plane crash: Families seek international help to find black boxes

Relatives of the five crew members aboard a K2 Airways cargo plane that crashed into the Arabian Sea are urging an international search for the flight recorders to determine the cause of the July 7 incident. The water depth in the crash area is approximately 3,000 meters, making the recovery of the black boxes a complex and expensive undertaking that would likely require foreign expertise.

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Finding the “black boxes” would require a costly underwater search likely to need foreign assistance, according to aviation experts familiar with deepwater crashes such as Air France 447 in 2009.

Debris from the Boeing 737 freighter was recovered shortly after the crash, but the families have since held funeral prayers, having lost hope of recovering the bodies. Pakistan's government has not yet responded to questions regarding potential foreign assistance for the search. K2 Airways, which lost its only aircraft in the crash, has also not commented.

The pilots reported a navigational system issue at 9:18 p.m. Pakistan time while en route to Karachi from Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. Pakistan's airports authority stated that local air traffic control attempted to guide the plane, but radar systems showed a rapid descent, and communication was lost three minutes later. Flight tracking data indicates the plane experienced a rapid plunge, a subsequent climb, and then a catastrophic dive.

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One of the plane’s two inertial reference units (IRUs), which feed information on the aircraft’s position, speed and orientation to the cockpit displays, was replaced in Sharjah before the flight while the pilots awaited a replacement part from the U.S. after a maintenance fault.

One of the plane's inertial reference units (IRUs) was replaced in Sharjah before the flight due to a maintenance fault. While aircraft accidents are often caused by multiple factors, it remains unclear if this replacement is linked to the crash. A similar malfunction in an IRU contributed to the 2007 Adam Air crash in Indonesia, where pilots became fixated on troubleshooting erroneous data, leading to a loss of control.

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Aircraft accidents are usually caused by multiple factors, and it remains unclear whether the replacement of the IRU is related to the crash.