New Delhi: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have called off-duty captain of a Flydubai aircraft a hero. After Wednesday’s violent attack in the cockpit, which ended up saving the lives of 174 people on board the aircraft, he credited the pilot.
According to Israeli authorities the Boeing 737 Max 8 was en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv, possibly when the co-pilot stabbed the captain in the head, Captain Smit Machchhar. The co-pilot’s intentions were to bring down the aircraft as it approached Israel, Netanyahu said. Netanyahu said in X that although Machchhar suffered serious injuries, managed to open the cockpit door and drove off attackers and passengers who succeeded in entering the aircraft.
When Flightradar24’s flight-tracking data showed the plane started to drop from 33,000 feet to approximately 17,000 feet in about a minute, it did so before stabilising. It landed at Tabuk in the northwest of Saudi Arabia in an emergency landing. Netanyahu stated that the co-pilot was arrested by the Saudi authorities and questioned. The man is an Omani national, while the co-pilot is yet to be identified, Israeli officials told Reuters.
In a press interview with the U.S. media, Netanyahu refuted the idea that the operation amounted to a hijacking. According to the descriptions of the passengers, it resembled a suicide attempt, he said. It was too early to tell if Iran played any role, he added, but noted that there had been earlier indications Tehran and its proxies wanted to increase attacks on Israelis abroad. There has been no reason found and Flydubai has cautioned against any speculation at this moment.
UAE government-owned Flydubai described the situation as an “altercation in the cockpit,” and stated that crew on duty safely landed the plane. It was a security incident that has been contained, said the aviation regulator in UAE. The airline has halted all flights to and from Israel and is in
Aeronautics, passengers gave dramatic accounts of the struggle. Facing the pilot, he pulled the controls back, as he had seen on TV, until crew took over, said Yaniv Hayun. Netanyahu’s office announced that he was filmed hugging Hayun at Ben Gurion airport as he was sporting his bloodstained shirt. Other passengers also restrained the attacker, according to one of them, who claimed he did so out of instinct to save his family. Naama Bershadski said that she closed her eyes and prayed, confident they were going to die.
Netanyahu told Trump that an Israeli plumber helped level the plane, a fact that has not been independently verified, Trump said. Later on a Flydubai rescue aircraft took the passengers from Tabuk to Tel Aviv.
Israel will now vet all the identities of pilots bringing in aircraft and will implement some degree of security screening, Netanyahu’s spokesman Doron Spielman said.
The embassy of India in Riyadh said that Captain Machchhar is hospitalized in Tabuk and is reported to be in “stable condition”. The two pilots were hospitalized with injuries, Saudi authorities said.
