The request did not seem strange to him. Somewhere over Saudi Arabia, Captain Smit Machchhar’s first officer asked if he could pray in the cockpit. Machchhar said yes, and out of respect he did not look back. After four or five minutes, he felt a heavy blow to the back of his head. At first he thought something terrible had gone wrong with the plane itself.
Machchhar, a pilot from India, was the captain of Flydubai Flight 1073 on 30 September 2026. The plane was flying from Dubai to Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv. There were 174 passengers and six crew on board. His first officer, the second pilot, was Hamam al-Hammami from Oman. Passengers say that al-Hammami hit the captain with the axe that is kept in the cockpit. He hurt him badly and sent the plane down very steeply. It seems he wanted to take control of the plane and crash it.
About two hours into the flight, the plane started to lose height fast and turned sharply to the north. It fell 16,000 feet in about 30 seconds. Alberto Paduanelli, a flight teacher in southern England, tested the fall in a flight simulator, a machine that copies a real flight. He said it would feel like a “vertical roller coaster”. People without a seat belt would lift up from their seats.
In the cockpit, the co-pilot hit Machchhar again and again. The captain later told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he almost lost his sight. But even in this bad state, he reached once more for the cockpit door. He said he felt he had “one more fight left” in him. He managed to open it, and that let the passengers help.
In the cabin, screaming passengers said the co-pilot was attacking the captain, and that there was blood everywhere. When the door opened, one passenger grabbed the co-pilot and pulled him out. Others fought with him until he was under control.
Someone still had to fly the plane, and here the flight was lucky. Two pilots in uniform were on board as passengers. They were only there because they had to fly the plane back from Tel Aviv to Dubai. Daniel Schlichter, a passenger in the second row, said the first of them acted like a hero. He thought the two pilots needed perhaps ten minutes or more to make the plane fly level again. The fall was so strong that part of the rudder, a moving part at the back of the plane, was torn away. A mayday call went out while they looked for a place to land.
Schlichter was not happy at once. After the plane was level, the pilots said nothing to the passengers, and this silence worried him. He was afraid they might take the plane to Iran, which was not far away. After about 45 minutes, the pilots said they would land in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and that everything was going to be OK. Schlichter decided to trust them. Three days later, Flydubai had still not given the two men’s names.
Nearly four hours after take-off, the plane landed in Tabuk, where medical teams and security officials were waiting. All 180 people on board survived.
Praise for the captain came quickly. Netanyahu wrote about his “extraordinary bravery”. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi called Machchhar on 2 October to wish him a fast recovery.
Now the investigation is looking at the co-pilot. On 3 October, the UAE prosecutor general called the attack a “terrorist attack”. An Australian team is checking his links to Australia, where sources say he studied at a university in Melbourne. Flydubai says the investigation is still going on, and Oman has not said anything.
In his call with Netanyahu, the captain explained why he kept reaching for the door while the plane was falling. “I knew I couldn’t let the passengers die,” Machchhar said.