A man has described how he hugged and reassured his two young children as their plane suddenly descended after one pilot stabbed the other in an attempt to seize control of the flight. A Flydubai plane plunged more than 17,000ft (5,200m) in less than two minutes around two hours into its journey from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, before passengers and crew overpowered him and retook control to land safely. Adam Polovincik told BBC Newshour that he hugged his six-year-old son and three-year-old daughter "really hard" and tried to stay calm for them as the attack unfolded.
He praised the pilot who was stabbed and passengers who fought off and subdued the attacker, saying they were "true heroes". The stabbed pilot is in a stable condition in hospital, while the alleged attacker has been arrested. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it was too early to say whether Iran was involved in the attack, but that the alleged attacker had undergone "Islamist radical indoctrination".
Polovincik, who was sitting in aisle 13, was flying home with his wife and children after an "amazing" holiday in Singapore and Thailand. He said there had been a "huge degree of panic" on the plane as there was a "very, very, very sharp decrease in height". What we know about stabbing on Flydubai flight to Israel He thought at first that this was simply because of an air pocket, but "it took a lot of time, almost a minute".
Everyone who had not been seated fell to the floor, the 40-year-old said. "After a couple of seconds, we started to hear screams. 'There is blood, there is stabbing, we need help'," Polovincik said. "At the end of the day, you understand very, very quickly that literally there is nothing that you can do at this point in time," he said.
Polovincik, a performance marketing analyst, said he tried to "be cool" for his children. "You just tell them, yeah, everything's going to be all right. It's just a malfunction in the aeroplane, there is a crew under control, the passengers are helping them, [you] hug them really hard and try to keep your face so it doesn't look very panicked, try to keep your tone of voice." But he said there was naturally a "high degree of panic" on the flight.
There were lots of families with children on the plane because the flight took place towards the end of a Jewish holiday period. After about 10 to 15 minutes, he said a passenger in the cockpit told them the incident was "under control" and other staff were flying the plane. In a video released by Netanyahu's office, passenger Yaniv Hayun described putting the attacker in a chokehold and pulling him out of the cockpit before other passengers helped pin him down.
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