Unverified claim India shot down PIA Flight PK404 resurfaces

The disappearance of PIA Flight PK404 in 1989 has been tied again to an unverified claim that an Indian fighter shot the aircraft down, after a Pakistani aviation commentator repeated the assertion and a teenager published Google Earth imagery he reads as wreckage.

Defence Security Asia reported that the commentator, who gives his name as Saad and describes himself as a Boeing 737NG and Max type rating examiner, says India's Western Command brought the Fokker down and that PIA's pilots knew what had happened. The outlet said he produced no evidence linking the aircraft to any military action.

The imagery was interpreted by Faseeh Ali Rajput, 17, who reads shapes in archived Google Earth pictures near the Wakhan Corridor as a possible debris field including cockpit sections. Defence Security Asia said the reading depends on the scale and authenticity of the images and on whether the aircraft could have reached the glacier.

The Fokker F27-200 Friendship, registration AP-BBF, left Gilgit for Islamabad at about 7.36am on 25 August 1989 on a scheduled domestic flight of roughly 306 kilometres, timetabled at 55 minutes. The crew reported at 7.40am that the aircraft expected to cross the Bravo reporting point at 7.59am and reach Islamabad at 8.32am. Contact was lost at about 7.45am, nine minutes after departure.

All 49 passengers, five of them infants, and five crew members are presumed dead. No wreckage, flight recorder or body was found, leaving investigators without physical evidence for a cause. Pakistan sent C-130 transports, helicopters, PIA aircraft and ground parties into the mountains; the Indian Air Force ran a separate search on its side of the Line of Control. The International Civil Aviation Organization lists the loss in its accident reporting system, and no public investigation report has established a cause.

Defence Security Asia said the shootdown account rests on an assumption that PK404 drifted into airspace India controlled, while the normal Gilgit-Islamabad routing does not cross the Line of Control. One published reconstruction put Bunji, southeast of Gilgit on the Indus, 80 to 100 kilometres from the line, with 15 to 20 minutes of extra flying needed to reach it after any diversion.

The outlet said no public radar plot, interception communication or military action report links Western Command to the Fokker, and that Saad has not named a unit, an intercepting aircraft or a weapon. His September 2024 claim held that the flight passed through the Babusar Pass, went unidentified, and that its wreckage was later collected by India.

AP-BBF, powered by two Rolls-Royce Dart 532-7E turboprops and in service since 1962, had logged about 44,524 flying hours and more than 41,500 pressurisation cycles. Weather at Gilgit was clear at departure and poor elsewhere on the route, and another PIA Fokker that left Gilgit minutes earlier landed safely. Defence Security Asia judged controlled flight into terrain and sudden mechanical failure equally plausible on the record, and said mountain valleys limited radar coverage, leaving the time contact was lost only a partial guide to where the aircraft went.