Questions remain about how a pilot managed to sneak a weapon aboard a plane and stab his fellow pilot before it plunged thousands of feet in mere seconds. The attacker was thwarted, passengers said, and the plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Aviatar Alevi, a 17-year-old student, told NBC News on Wednesday after he and the rest of the passengers were flown to Tel Aviv.
Here is what we know about the incident and how close it came to resulting in tragedy. Alevi described a harrowing scene aboard the flight, with people “screaming, running, panicking, blood.” “At the start, I thought it was a plane malfunction, but then I started hearing screaming about the stabbings,” he said. At Ben Gurion Airport, after the passengers had returned to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Hayun, whom he later identified as a plumber.
Three others helped in the effort to save the plane and those aboard, Hayun told reporters. The group struggled to open the cockpit door. We really put our heads together and worked as a team,” he said.
We had to pull through and come out on top,” he added. Hailed as a hero, Indian pilot Smit Machchhar was credited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on X for saving “the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals.” Even though he was bleeding heavily, Machchhar managed to unlock the door to the cockpit, Netanyahu told Fox News, allowing crew members and passengers to subdue his colleague and regain control of the plane. The Indian Embassy in Saudi Arabia said in a post on X that he was admitted to hospital in Tabuk, where the plane landed, and was “reported to be in stable condition.” According to his LinkedIn profile, Machchhar, who was also praised on social media by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, worked with India’s SpiceJet airline for more than 11 years before joining Flydubai.
He has logged more than 9,750 flying hours, the profile says. Machchhar trained as a pilot at Mainland Air in the New Zealand city of Dunedin for 18 months, beginning in 2008, the school’s CEO, Philip Kean, told the country’s 1News outlet. Machchhar “did very well” as a student and later returned to India where he worked as a recruiter for the school, Kean said.
Few details have been released about the alleged attacker, including his name and his condition. Two senior U.S. law enforcement officials briefed on the incident told NBC News that investigators say the pilot who began stabbing the other pilot is from Oman. Omani authorities have not commented and the Omani Foreign Ministry and the embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment from NBC News.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
