Pilot’s worrying final message before plane went missing as wreckage found

Experts say the last message from a pilot of a Boeing 737 cargo plane which disappeared off the coast of Pakistan was a sign things were going wrong.

Air traffic control lost contact with the plane as it was flying from Sharjah, UAE to Karachi, Pakistan, yesterday (7 July), with the aircraft reporting a navigational systems issue at 9:18pm local time.

FlightRadar data appears to show that two minutes later the plane was descending rapidly, and contact was lost a minute afterwards.

The plane dropped 5,000 feet in less than a minute, ascended 6,000 feet in less than 30 seconds, before appearing to drop 36,550 feet and then contact was lost.

A search and rescue operation has recovered the wreckage of the plane after 12 hours of searching, but not the five crew members who were on board.

According to news.com.au, the 737's final transmission had the pilot saying the aircraft was 'rolling or floating', with rolling in this context meaning a phase of flight and floating referring to a landing error.

As such the final message is a worrying insight into the final minutes of the aircraft's flying time before it crashed into the Arabian Sea.

Pilot Mohammad Rizwan Idrees, first officer Faisal Mehmood, load master Muhammad Toufique Khan and engineers Arif Siddiqui and Mohammad Hamid have not yet been found.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said he had 'deep sorrow, grief, and regret over the tragic incident' for the families of the five missing crew members.

The aircraft was operated by the company K2 Airways, the 737 cargo plane that crashed into the sea is the only plane in their fleet.

The plane flew for 27 years and previously operated as a passenger plane for airlines Aeroflot and Garuda Indonesia before it was transformed into a cargo vessel.

Per the Independent, aviation expert Imran Aslam said that it wasn't clear what had caused the plane to drop off air traffic monitoring.

The expert noted that even if the plane had lost power the plane would have likely glided instead of plunged suddenly as monitoring equipment showed it had.

He said that further investigation into the wreckage of the plane would help shed light on what exactly had happened and it would be up to investigators to work out the truth.

Search efforts for the five missing crew members are ongoing but the recovery of the plane wreckage is a major step in piecing together the puzzle of what happened.