A stabbing, an emergency alert, a terrifying mid-air plunge. Details are still emerging after an Israel-bound flight carrying some 180 people emitted a distress signal Wednesday, raising fears of a possible hijacking when one pilot stabbed the other in the cockpit. Aviatar Alevi, who was onboard the Flydubai flight Wednesday, described people “screaming, running, panicking, blood.” “At the start I thought it was a plane malfunction, but then I started hearing screaming about the stabbings,” Alevi, 17, told NBC News.
The passengers, who had been flying from Dubai before the crisis, were mobbed by media and flag-waving fellow Israelis after finally arriving at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport. They said they had feared for their lives after the plane plunged more than 14,000 feet in the span of 29 seconds at one point, according to FlightRadar24. You don’t understand anything,” 16-year-old Peleg Itali told NBC News.
Captain Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, was recovering in a hospital in Saudi Arabia on Thursday as the other pilot, so far identified only as an Omani citizen, was being interrogated elsewhere in the country. Machchhar was widely praised for his efforts to prevent the plane from crashing, opening the cockpit door and allowing passengers and crew to rush in. Few details had emerged about the pilot as of Thursday morning.
Questions about a possible motive, including whether it was terrorism-related, hang over the attack. It looks like a suicide attempt, simply because of what this hero, Yaniv, has described,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on “CBS Evening News,” as he praised Yaniv Hayun, who rushed into the cockpit and subdued the attacker. Hayun, who was pictured with his shirt spattered with blood sitting next to Netanyahu, said that he had confronted the pilot who had initiated the attack, according to the Israeli government press office.
We really put our heads together and worked as a team,” Hayun said, adding: “It was between fear and a sense of a do-or-die situation.” “We had to win. We had to pull through and come out on top,” he said. Hayun told Netanyahu that he had acted based on what he’d seen on a TV show and helped stabilize the plane.
Flydubai said on-duty crew who were onboard the flight were able to land the plane. Netanyahu said it was still too early to determine why the pilot apparently stabbed his colleague and appeared to try to take over the Flydubai flight, and whether there was any Iranian involvement. President Donald Trump also weighed in, calling it “an incredible story.” “It seems as though the co-pilot was perhaps a terrorist or perhaps a whack job, and he stabbed the pilot,” Trump told reporters.
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