No known cause of crash
Flight ED202 took off from the Karachi airport at 7:45 a.m. and was supposed to land in Islamabad about two hours later, civil aviation official Pervez George said.
The plane was preparing to land "when it lost contact with the control tower, and later we learned that the plane had crashed," George said.
It was not immediately clear what caused the crash, he added, though weather reports suggested that the plane was trying to land during a period of difficult, cloudy weather.
Saqlain Atlaf was on a family outing in the hills outside of Islamabad when the passenger jet crashed.
"The plane had lost balance, then we saw it going down," Atlaf told Pakistan's ARY news channel.
Other witness accounts suggested the plane was flying a very low, unsteady course right before it crashed.
Earlier Wednesday, Airblue spokesperson Raheel Ahmed said the Airbus involved in the crash was only eight years old and had no known technical issues.
Airbus said it would assist Pakistani authorities in their investigation.
According to figures from Airbus, the downed plane had 34,000 flight hours and had been used in 13,500 flights.
The Airblue airline is based out of Karachi and operates domestic flights within Pakistan, as well as flights to the United Arab Emirates, Oman and the United Kingdom.
ctv.ca