Relatives of the five crew members aboard a Boeing 737 cargo plane that crashed into the Arabian Sea off Pakistan last week are urging an international search effort to find the flight recorders to determine the cause.

Pakistan Cargo Crash Investigation

Debris from the K2 Airways freighter was recovered shortly after the July 7 crash, but the water in the area is about 3,000 m (9,800 feet) deep. 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.

The locator beacons on the 27-year-old plane were designed to transmit pings for only 30 days. Recovering the recorders could show whether a navigation system issue reported shortly before the crash was linked to a navigation component that relatives say was replaced before the flight.

International Assistance Needed

Pakistan has provided no public update on the search for a week, and an industrial company with underwater search expertise told Reuters it had not heard of any requests by Pakistan for assistance from foreign companies or navies.

“The search has to continue, and whatever resources can be deployed, locally and internationally, should be deployed,” Yashib Rizwan, the eldest son of Captain Rizwan Idris, told Reuters. “For us a transparent investigation is key.”

Engineer Muhammad Arif Siddiqui’s son, Abdur Rafay Siddiqui, also called for international assistance if needed. Both families have held funeral prayers after losing hope the bodies would be recovered.

Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.