It was the first time hero passengers Daniel Schlichter, Zvika Manes, Tal Samuel and Asaf Rajuan had seen each other since those terrifying moments on FlyDubai's Flight 1073. "That minute is probably the longest minute of my life," said Schlichter about the plane's terrifying freefall. "And the first thing that went up is actually 9/11.
And I said, 'How can it be? How can we end this life like that?' You see all your life and you think about what is important. And just holding my wife's hand and saying, 'If we have to go, we have to go.'" Their Boeing 737 Max was nosediving into the Arabian Desert nearly at the speed of sound.
The co-pilot from Oman had stabbed the captain, grabbed the controls, and tried to crash the plane full of Israeli passengers. The jet plummeted 14,000 feet in seconds. They were less than 30 seconds from crashing, with G-forces Manes described as being "like a roller coaster." What they couldn't have known was that inside the locked cockpit, Captain Smit Machchhar was fighting for his life, as he told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday: "The co-pilot, he wanted to pray.
And suddenly there was a big blow to the back of my head," Machchhar said. "I did try to stop him, and that's when I gave everything that I had, and just went for the door and opened the door and thankfully people were waiting." Manes and his family were sitting in the first row. His wife had just taken his daughter to the bathroom.
"I heard my daughter shouting, 'He's stabbing the pilot. He's stabbing the pilot.' She was shouting like animal," he said. At that moment, Rajuan said they thought they were going to die.
Schlichter, holding his wife's hand, thought to himself, "'If I have to go, I'll hold her hand as tight as possible, and we'll go together.' That's it." Almost simultaneously, these passengers decided they had to take action. "I saw my daughter and my wife, and I understand that I must run. I turn, switch to an animal switch, and I feel really like an animal. … I decided that we are going to survive, try to survive, to save my family," Manes said.
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