FlyDubai co-pilot attacks captain with knife mid-flight

FlyDubai flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv turned into a bloody drama on Wednesday at an altitude of around 10,000 meters: the co-pilot, from Oman, stabbed the Indian captain with a knife while trying to seize the controls and send the plane toward the ground. There were 174 passengers on board, including 27 children, and it was the passengers who ultimately stopped the attacker.

A knife in the cockpit at 10,000 meters

According to witnesses, Captain Smit Macchar was stabbed by his colleague, the co-pilot, when he tried to stop him taking the controls. The plane suddenly nosed into a dive and began losing altitude rapidly. According to the tracking service Flightradar24, the Boeing 737 dropped about 4,300 meters in just 29 seconds. Passengers in the cabin were shouting, “Is there a doctor on board? We need a pilot!” — while others called for the attacker in the cockpit to be restrained.

Passengers overpowered the attacker

What saved the situation was the cool-headedness of fellow travelers. Israeli plumber Yaniv Hayun helped force his way into the cockpit, overpowered the co-pilot, took the controls himself and stabilized the aircraft. Two other passengers burst into the cockpit alongside him, and according to one witness, the four men “grabbed the attacker by the throat” and dragged him out of the cockpit, then tied his hands and feet. Throughout, witnesses said, the attacker asked for nothing except: “Kill me.”

A six-year-old girl raised the alarm

A key role in foiling the hijacking was played by six-year-old Nina Manes and her mother, Tali — the two had stepped away to the bathroom just before the co-pilot attacked the captain. Nina heard suspicious sounds from the cockpit and raised the alarm. “There was blood everywhere, you could see very sharp, jerky movements — there was a struggle,” the girl said. “I was screaming, ‘He's stabbing the pilot, he's stabbing the pilot, help!’ People were looking at me but didn't understand what I was talking about.”

At that moment the plane “went into a spin and started plunging rapidly.” Nina's father, Tzvika, rushed to the bathroom to get his daughter to safety, then burst into the cockpit together with two other passengers to subdue the attacker. “My daughters' screams as the plane hurtled toward the ground still ring in my head,” he said later, once safe. “I heard my wife and daughter screaming, ‘Dad, we don't want to die.’ It was their screams that made me rush into the cockpit,” he said.

A dentist saved the captain; the co-pilot is being questioned in Saudi Arabia

Another hero of the flight was 47-year-old Shota Musaev, an Israeli dentist born in Georgia. He rushed to help the badly wounded captain. “Everything was calm when the plane suddenly dropped sharply. We thought it was turbulence. I took out my camera and started filming. About half a minute later there was noise from the front of the cabin — screaming, and a woman's voice shouting, ‘Knife! Knife!’” he said. According to Musaev, the captain was losing a lot of blood: he had serious cuts to his arm and neck, as well as a deep wound on the back of his head. “The whole cockpit was covered in blood, but he stayed conscious. We had almost no medical equipment — we managed to stop the bleeding with pieces of cloth,” the dentist added. The bleeding captain, he said, kept repeating: “Save me. I don't want to die here.” The dentist also noted that his wife, who is normally easily frightened, found the strength in that moment to help every passenger on board.

After the incident, the plane made an emergency landing in the Saudi city of Tabuk, where the Omani co-pilot was questioned by investigators on Thursday and into the early hours of Friday. According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the co-pilot had “undergone radical Islamist indoctrination.” One Israeli official said the attacker's social media accounts “clearly show” that he had succumbed to radicalization and embraced jihadist ideology, and had written about killing Jews.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz