The flydubai incident: A miracle or a story of resourcefulness? - opinion

I do not believe in miracles. Alleged miracles are frequently the result of human intuition and resourcefulness, just like many catastrophes frequently result from human failures, misjudgments, and arrogance.

In my opinion, what happened last Wednesday in the case of flydubai flight FZ1073 from Dubai International Airport to Ben-Gurion Airport in Israel was an event of the former type, even though many reactions in Israel gave God full credit for it. My answer: “Ish ish be’emunato yichyeh” (Each person shall live within his faith).

The immediate culprit in this story was the Omani co-pilot on the flight, Hamam al-Hammami, who stabbed the plane’s Indian captain, Smit Machchhar, who was its main hero. Hammami’s intention was apparently to cause the plane, in which the majority of the 174 passengers were Israeli, to crash, possibly over Israeli territory.

Of course, beyond Hammami’s personal responsibility, there is that of the Dubai authorities who allowed the Omani pilot to co-pilot the flight to Tel Aviv, even though he had a record of extreme Islamic expressions and activities and had been removed from Oman Air, and Royal Air Maroc training courses, for the same reason.

At the time of writing, it is not yet known whether any terrorist organization or country stood behind Hammami, or whether he acted as a lone fanatic.

Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who seems eager to take credit for any successes associated with the event for reasons connected to the upcoming elections in Israel, announced on Friday in Hebrew that “whoever sent the pilot will pay a very heavy price.”

On CNN and Fox News, Netanyahu insinuated (in English) that Iran might well be involved but did not indicate whether this is merely speculation based on self-interest or a reflection of reality based on Israeli intelligence information.

Another question to which there is no definitive answer at present is whether Israel’s mutual flight agreements with the UAE in general and Dubai in particular contain reference to Israel’s requirement that pilots flying the planes of foreign companies to Israel should hold the citizenship of a country that maintains diplomatic relations with it.

If such a stipulation does exist (and at least one Israeli source quoted in the media has claimed that it does not), then Israel is at fault for not checking whether it is upheld on all flights of UAE airlines that land in Israel.

The hero of the story

As mentioned at the outset, the main hero of this episode was the plane’s Indian captain, Machchhar, without whom the plane and its passengers would not have come out intact or alive.

Despite his severe wounds and loss of blood, Machchhar managed to send two distress codes: Squawk 7700 (general emergency) and Squawk 7500 (unlawful interference/hijacking), and to verbally alert air traffic control about the ongoing physical attack against him inside the cockpit.

Most importantly, he managed to open the locked door into the cockpit, which cannot be opened from the outside. Once the door was open, four Israeli passengers managed to enter, overcome the co-pilot, who not only kept stabbing the captain but also tried to destroy equipment in the cockpit, and provide first aid to the pilot.

In addition to the four Israelis, two off-duty flydubai pilots who were on the flight (according to reports, they were supposed to fly the plane back to Dubai after the disembarkation of the passengers at Ben-Gurion Airport) entered the cockpit.

One of the two (apparently a British national) took control of the plane, after one of the Israelis – a plumber by the name of Yaniv Hayoun – attempted to stop the plane diving down at great speed (there was no one in control of the plane at the time) by pulling up the aircraft’s control yoke and thus managing to temporarily lift the plane from its dive.

Hayoun, who had never flown a plane in his life, had learned that pulling up the yoke was what had to be done in such a situation from a Canadian TV documentary series, Mayday, which deals with true cases of serious airplane accidents.

Hayoun’s act saved the plane and its passengers from a certain immediate crash, but it might also have been responsible for the plane losing the blades of the rotor in its tail, which could have caused the plane to fall apart midair. That this did not happen was due to exceptional good luck, though again, some might count it as a miracle.

At any rate, not only was the plane saved, but the two off-duty pilots managed to fly the plane to safety and land at the airport of Tabuk in southwestern Saudi Arabia, close to the Saudi border with Jordan. If the two off-duty pilots had not been on the plane, the plane and its passengers would have been doomed.

Incidentally, the Israeli who saved Machchhar’s life by stopping his profuse bleeding was a dentist of Georgian origin called Shota Musayev. The other three Israelis involved in detaining the co-pilot and saving the captain were Asaf Rajuan (the owner of an insurance brokerage), Zvika Manes (the CEO of Barak Capital), and his wife, Tali, who was the first to discover what was going on in the cockpit. The plane’s stewards (all men) are reported to have been in total confusion, not knowing what to do.

Conclusions from the incident

My conclusions from this extraordinary story are, firstly, that with low-cost airlines (and flydubai is officially in that category) the chances of something going extremely wrong seem greater, especially because of manpower issues.

Secondly, since many Israelis have active and diverse military experience, accompanied by a propensity to improvise, one is safer being part of a random Israeli group of people than part of a random group of people of any other nationality, if one gets into a messy situation.

In my opinion, it has nothing to do with our allegedly being “God’s chosen people” but rather with the very long history of the Jewish people in the Diaspora and its need to survive under difficult circumstances, and the Israeli ethos and self-confidence (at times an exaggerated and annoying self-confidence).

Though the catastrophe of October 7, 2023, threatened to severely damage this ethos and self-confidence, the flydubai incident has undoubtedly given both a boost.

Nevertheless, some irritation in Dubai concerning what they see as Israeli audacity regarding the role played by Israeli citizens in last Wednesday’s incident suggests that a measure of hatzne’ah lechet (walking humbly) might be called for.

The writer has written journalistic and academic articles, as well as several books, on international relations, Zionism, Israeli politics, and parliamentarism. From 1994 to 2010, she worked at the Knesset Library and the Knesset Research and Information Center.