A pilot on a plane travelling from Dubai to Tel Aviv stabbed the other pilot and then apparently tried to crash the aircraft Wednesday before being subdued by passengers and crew. The Boeing 737 made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, where the unnamed pilot was detained, but not before an abrupt descent prompted Israel to scramble warplanes over concerns of a possible hijacking. Here are some past examples of plane hijackings and attempted hijackings potentially involving pilots or crew members: An off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot tried to cut the engines of a Horizon Air jet travelling from Everett, Washington, to San Francisco while riding in an extra seat in the cockpit.
The plane was diverted and landed in Portland with more than 80 people. Joseph Emerson told police he was despondent over a friend’s recent death, had taken psychedelic mushrooms and hadn’t slept in days. A China Eastern Airlines flight from Kunming in southwest China to Guangzhou, near Hong Kong, slammed into a mountain, killing all 132 people aboard.
Chinese authorities have yet to release their final investigative report, but data released by American investigators earlier this year suggests the jet’s engines were deliberately shut off and there was a cockpit struggle before the plane nose-dived. The co-pilot on a Germanwings jet traveling from Barcelona, Spain, to Duesseldorf, Germany, locked the captain out of the cockpit and deliberately crashed the plane into the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board. Andreas Lubitz had struggled with depression and suffered from sleeplessness and fear of losing his vision.
Read moreCo-pilot contacted dozens of doctors ahead of Germanwings crash The co-pilot on an Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Milan, Italy, hijacked the jet and rerouted it to Geneva, Switzerland. Hailemedhin Abera Tegegn, the co-pilot, surrendered to local police and sought political asylum. None of the 193 passengers were harmed.
The pilot of a Mozambique Airlines plane traveling from the southern African nation to Angola deliberately downed the jet in a national park in Namibia, killing all 33 people on board. Authorities said at the time that Herminio dos Santos Fernandes, the pilot, locked the cockpit door and set the plane on course to crash when the co-pilot went to the bathroom. An EgyptAir flight from Los Angeles to Cairo plunged into the Atlantic Ocean off Nantucket, Massachusetts, killing all 217 passengers and crew on board.
American investigators concluded the copilot, Gameel Al-Batouti, set the plane on course to crash while the captain was in the bathroom. He then shut off the engines as the captain returned and struggled to right the plane. Egyptian authorities, however, disputed the findings, concluding in their own investigation that mechanical failure was to blame.
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