A pilot has been arrested after he stabbed the other pilot on a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv and "apparently tried to crash the plane", Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said. Passengers and crew overpowered the attacker and retook control of the Flydubai aircraft, landing it safely at an airport in Tabuk, northwestern Saudi Arabia, with more than 170 people on board. The passengers, who were almost all Israeli, arrived later on Wednesday in Tel Aviv on a repatriation flight.
The stabbed pilot, named as Indian national Captain Smit Machchhar, has been taken to hospital but is reported to be in a stable condition. Netanyahu praised him as a "true hero" of "extraordinary bravery". "Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker — preventing a catastrophic mid-air disaster," Netanyahu wrote on X.
"He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals." The Indian embassy in Saudi Arabia said Machchhar was in a stable condition in hospital. No motive for the incident has been given and the pilot was under investigation in Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu told Fox News on Wednesday night, before he was expected to be taken back to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where the flight took off from. Israel was "likely" to contribute to the investigation, the prime minister added.
US President Donald Trump said he had spoken with Netanyahu following the incident, saying it seemed as though the attacker was "perhaps a terrorist" or there were other reasons behind the attack. Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has also called it an "attempted jihadist terror attack", without giving any details. Flydubai's flight FZ1073 took off from Dubai International Airport in the UAE at (07:05 local time), en route to Ben-Gurion Airport in Israel.
Around two and a half hours into its journey, data from flight tracking website Flightrader24 reported a rapid descent over Saudi Arabia, dropping more than 17,000 feet (over 5,000m) in less than two minutes. Minutes later, the plane signalled an emergency code - squawk 7700 - before switching it to a squawk 7500 code reporting a hijacking. Around 20 minutes after these codes were signalled, the plane looped back into Saudi Arabia, where it later started its manual descent for landing.
Less than an hour later, the plane returned to squawk 7700. Shortly after the incident, the Israeli and Saudi Arabian air forces dispatched fighter jets, while Netanyahu held urgent consultations. Initial media reports suggested a fight had broken out between the aircraft's two pilots, causing the rapid descent and landing.
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