At around 9.30 on Wednesday morning local time, Tali Manes was taking her six-year-old daughter, Nina, to the toilet on the regular flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv when she heard a series of heavy blows against the cockpit door. Manes, an Israeli bank executive, immediately told a flight attendant seated nearby that something was wrong. When he did not react, she shouted at him: “Something is happening in there!” Seconds later, the man “simply went to the [cockpit] door and opened it”, Manes told Israel’s Channel 12 TV.
Inside, the scene was the stuff of travellers’ nightmares: blood spattered over the cockpit walls and a brutal struggle in progress between the badly injured pilot and the co-pilot, who was armed with some kind of sharp weapon. There was no one at the controls of the Boeing 737. Manes shouted again: “He’s stabbing the pilot, he’s stabbing the pilot, come help!” Many of the details of what happened on flight FZ 1073 are still unclear, but what happened next is well documented by witness testimony and videos.
As the plane went into a steep dive, losing 16,000ft of altitude in about a minute, most of the 182 passengers screamed, prayed and tried desperately to reassure panicking children. But a small group rushed to the cockpit and overpowered the co-pilot. One, a plumber, copied an action seen on TV documentaries about plane crashes to pull the aircraft out of its dive.
Two off-duty pilots on the flight, both among the handful of non-Israeli passengers, then took over the controls of the now almost rudderless aircraft to guide it eventually to a landing 90 minutes later in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. In the meantime, Manes had helped truss the co-pilot with a telephone cord while a dentist treated the injured Indian pilot, Smit Machchhar. It was a “great miracle”, Manes said on eventually reaching Tel Aviv on an emergency flight 10 hours later.
In a video call with Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, broadcast live by TV networks, Machchhar, who is recovering in an Abu Dhabi hospital, said he had been “fighting for my life”. The pilot successfully sent an alarm to air traffic control signalling the attack and then, as his strength ebbed, managed to unlock the cockpit security door. I had fallen down,” Machhchar said.
In Israel, there is little doubt about the co-pilot’s intentions. The worst scenario is he was trying to get into Israel,” said Arik Arad, the chair of the aviation cybersecurity consultancy Cyviation and El Al’s former head of security at Ben Gurion airport Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has claimed the co-pilot was exposed to “Islamist radical indoctrination”, saying Israeli investigators had found evidence on social media accounts that he wanted to “kill Jews”. Experts said there had been only a handful of instances of suicide by plane – cases where the pilot’s motivation is primarily to kill him or herself by crashing the plane, rather than using the plane as a weapon, as in the 9/11 attacks.
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