‘There was nobody in the cockpit’: Israeli passenger reconstructs flydubai attack

“There was nobody in the cockpit,” Tal says, almost matter-of-factly. Then comes the next part: “I had to shake the pilots.”

And after the aircraft was back under control: “We put an Israeli guard on every crew member.”

Several days after the attack aboard a flydubai flight bound for Israel, those three sentences help fill in what happened inside the aircraft during the moments that remain hardest to reconstruct.

Tal, an Israeli businessman who lives abroad, met with The Jerusalem Post Editor-in-Chief Zvika Klein at the Carlton hotel on Tel Aviv’s beachfront, overlooking the city skyline, to walk through the sequence and review footage from inside the aircraft.

Tal remarked on how strange it felt to see Tel Aviv from there. The previous day, he and the other passengers had been desperate simply to land and finally reach Israel.

He had been sitting in row six, directly behind business class. Two additional flydubai pilots were seated nearby as passengers.

Tal noticed them when he boarded.

“I’m a frequent traveler,” he said. “I realized immediately when I boarded the flight that they are next to me.”

That observation became crucial when the crisis began.

According to Tal, there was a period during the confrontation when nobody was in the cockpit. One pilot had been wounded, another was involved in the fight, and the aircraft was descending.

The two men capable of taking control were still sitting among the passengers.

Tal shouted at them to move.

They did not, he said.

“I had to shake them to get them to move to the front and take control of the plane, because it was diving.”

One eventually went forward and took control, while the second took longer to recover from the shock, Tal said.

He has consistently played down his own role. In an earlier WhatsApp exchange with the Post from Saudi Arabia, he described what he had done as “combat support,” while emphasizing that three other Israelis had physically subdued the attacker.

That “support” included getting the pilots forward and helping find something to restrain the attacker.

The solution was improvised.

Charging cables.

“In the desert, every thorn is a flower,” Tal wrote.

An Israeli dentist meanwhile treated the wounded pilot, whom Tal described as being in serious condition.

‘We’re running the flight now’
According to Tal, the next stage began after the attacker had been subdued and pilots were back in the cockpit.

The Israeli passengers still did not know whether the danger was over.

Tal said they moved crew members away from the immediate scene and told them: “From now on, we’re running the flight.”

They then placed an Israeli beside each crew member.

While reviewing footage with Klein, Tal explained the thinking behind that decision.

“All the Israelis are aligned that we should have only Israelis in key points,” he said.

He was particularly concerned about the cockpit.

“That’s a point when I’m trying to make sure that you have an Israeli in the cockpit.”

The passengers were improvising a security system in real time.

There was no formal chain of command and no plan. People simply took on roles.

Some fought the attacker. Tal dealt with the pilots. The dentist treated the wounded. Others watched crew members and secured what Tal called “key points.”

The footage reviewed during the interview showed fragments of that period.

Flight attendants moved through the cabin. A man with blood on his clothing passed through the frame. Tal himself could be seen near the front.

“This is me looking at... trying to understand what’s going on,” he said.

He remembers the event primarily through tasks.

Get the pilots forward.

Find restraints.

Secure the cockpit.

Work out who is where.

Tal said he had very little sense of time.

“I was also... in acting mode, like doing things,” he said. “So I didn’t really notice the time.”

There was one moment, however, when he stopped.

A girl’s father was among the Israelis fighting the attacker. Tal remembered her screaming that she did not want him to die.

“That was the only moment when I stopped and thought about my own children.”

Tal had been traveling alone. His children live abroad and at the time did not yet know what had happened.

Days later, Tal remains careful about what he did and did not witness.

When reports circulated that the attacker had shouted “Allahu akbar,” Tal said he had heard no such thing despite standing close to the cockpit.

“None of us heard it.”

His account remains that of an eyewitness, and parts of the sequence require independent corroboration.

But the details he describes offer a clearer picture of the minutes after the initial violence: an empty cockpit, pilots still sitting among passengers, improvised restraints, a dentist treating the wounded, and Israeli passengers assigning themselves positions until the aircraft was safely on the ground.