30 seconds of terror, 14,300 feet plunge, 'blood everywhere': Indian pilot fights off co-pilot on flydubai flight

The co-pilot of a flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv allegedly stabbed the captain on Wednesday morning, triggering a battle in the cockpit during which the Boeing 737 MAX 8 plunged 14,300 feet in roughly 30 seconds over northern Saudi Arabia. The jet broadcast a hijack alert and diverted to Tabuk, where it landed safely, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu credited its wounded Indian captain with fighting back and opening the cockpit door so that passengers and crew could overpower the attacker.

The captain, Smit Machchhar, is from Ghatkopar East in Mumbai and was based in Dubai for work, people aware of the matter told HT. Both pilots were hospitalised, Tabuk Airport said. Machchhar underwent surgery and is stable, while the other pilot, whose name was not known at the time of going to press, was arrested by Saudi authorities.

Israel PM lauds ‘extraordinary bravery’

In a post on X, Netanyahu saluted Machchhar’s “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,” he wrote. “He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals.”

In an earlier video message, Netanyahu said the pilot who attacked his colleague wanted to crash the airliner, and that another crew that happened to be on board stabilised the aircraft after the attacker was subdued. It was not clear if this was indeed the case or just Netanyahu’s estimation of what transpired.

Israeli officials told Reuters the attacker was an Omani national.

Parag Shah, the Bharatiya Janata Party legislator from Ghatkopar East, said he had spoken to Machchhar’s family and that Machchhar “is safe and receiving treatment”. His parents have left for Dubai, Shah said. “The government is taking care of him,” he said.

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Machchhar grew up in Ghatkopar and studied in Mumbai, a family friend said. He joined flydubai’s 737 fleet as a direct-entry captain in June 2022 after 11 years with SpiceJet in Mumbai, where he rose to senior commander and, from November 2020, trained and checked other pilots, according to his LinkedIn profile. The profile lists 9,750 flying hours and a business administration degree from the Welingkar Institute of Management. His brother is a pilot with Akasa Air, the people said.

What transpired on the flydubai flight

A passenger on the flight - FZ1073 - Miriam Abukasis, heard screaming and saw a man with a knife force one of the pilots to the floor, with blood everywhere, her mother Yasmin told Reuters in Tel Aviv. In a video purportedly recorded by another passenger and carried widely by Israeli media, the passenger said one pilot was seriously hurt and the other slightly. The plane carried about 150 Israelis, Israeli media reported, and flydubai said all passengers were safe.

Flight data from Flightradar24 and ADS-B Exchange, analysed by HT, show the plane took off from Dubai at 7.05am local time and cruised west over Saudi Arabia at 34,000 feet. At 8.21am Saudi time (10.51am IST), a little over two hours into the flight and about 235km north-east of Tabuk, it began to descend. Between two readings 37 seconds apart it fell from 33,225 feet to 18,925 feet, about 23,000 feet a minute. At a typical 2,000 feet a minute, an airliner would take seven minutes to lose that height.

Photographs of the aircraft at Tabuk appear to show the rudder torn from its tail. That kind of damage can occur when control surfaces are moved too hard at high speed, and it would fit a dive as violent as the one the flight data record. HT could not independently verify the authenticity of the photographs.

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The plane bottomed out at 16,600 feet as its ground speed peaked at 598 knots (1,107km/h), then climbed more than 5,000 feet, fell again to 13,675 feet by 8.27am and levelled off at about 15,000 feet. Receivers lost its position for nine minutes. When the track resumed at 8.31am, the transponder showed 7700, the general emergency code, and at 8.35am it switched to 7500, the hijack code. It was not clear who set the codes.

The plane flew on northwest into Jordan, turned back and was over Saudi territory by 8.45am.

Reports that the plane approached the speed of sound rest on ground speed, the only speed the public data record for the dive.

Parallel threats from the past

The closest precedent is EgyptAir Flight 990, a Boeing 767 that crashed into the Atlantic in October 1999 after its relief first officer deliberately put it into a dive, according to US investigators at the time. The plane fell from about 33,000 feet to about 16,000 feet in roughly 36 seconds as the captain, who had returned to the cockpit, tried to pull it out. It climbed briefly before breaking up, killing all 217 people on board. Egypt rejected the American finding.

Three months earlier, a hijacker on an All Nippon Airways Boeing 747 stabbed the captain to death and let the jet descend to within a few hundred metres of the ground near Tokyo, before crew and an off-duty pilot overpowered him and recovered the aircraft.

Doron Spielman, a spokesperson for Netanyahu, first ruled out a hijacking and two hours later said that assessment had changed, according to Bloomberg. Netanyahu held security consultations and cleared his schedule for the day, an Israeli official told Reuters. His office said all measures were being taken to bring the Israeli passengers home, and the transport ministry said Emirati authorities were working on their return.

Israel’s far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote on X: “Terrorism is a devil with whom no agreement must be reached.” The incident comes weeks before Israel’s first election since the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, in a campaign where security has figured prominently.

Israel has no diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia. It has built close security and economic ties with the UAE since 2020, and Netanyahu met UAE President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan on Sunday. The UAE has not commented. Flydubai, Emirates’s sister carrier, has said only that the flight had an incident and diverted to Tabuk. The airline has flown between Dubai and Tel Aviv since late 2020 and runs 70 flights a week on the route, according to its website.