Somewhere over Saudi Arabia, Captain Smit Machchhar’s first officer asked if he could pray in the cockpit. The request did not seem strange, so Machchhar agreed and, in his words, “out of respect for him, I didn’t look back.” He kept his eyes forward. A few minutes later he felt a heavy blow to the back of his head. At first he thought something had gone terribly wrong with the aircraft itself.
Machchhar, an Indian pilot, was the captain of Flydubai Flight 1073, a regular service from Dubai to Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, on 30 September 2026. The Boeing 737 MAX 8 carried 174 passengers and six crew. His first officer was Hamam al-Hammami, from Oman. According to passengers, al-Hammami seriously wounded the captain with the cockpit crash axe and sent the plane into a steep dive, apparently trying to hijack and crash it.
About two hours into the journey, tracking data showed the aircraft quickly losing height and turning sharply north. The jet fell 16,000 feet in about 30 seconds. Alberto Paduanelli, an aviation instructor in southern England, recreated the fall in a flight simulator for Reuters. He said it would have felt like a “vertical roller coaster”, and that anyone without a seat belt would have been lifted from their seat.
Inside the cockpit, Machchhar was being hit again and again. He later told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he nearly lost his sight under the blows. While al-Hammami kept attacking him and kept the plane diving, the badly hurt captain reached once more for the cockpit door. He said he felt he had “one more fight left” in him.
That door is built to keep danger out. On this flight the danger was already inside. Machchhar managed to open it, and passengers were able to step in.
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, and others fought with him until he was under control. Video checked by CNN shows a seriously wounded pilot lying on the floor of the aircraft, his face partly covered by a mask.
The plane still had to be flown, and here the flight was lucky. Two pilots in uniform were travelling as passengers, because they were supposed to fly the plane back from Tel Aviv to Dubai. Airlines call this deadheading. Daniel Schlichter, who sat in the second row, told the Associated Press that the first of them “acted really like a hero” and seemed to understand exactly what was happening. Once the pair were inside and the door was closed again, it took perhaps ten minutes or more to steady the aircraft. The fall had been so extreme that part of its rudder was torn away. A mayday call went out as the men looked for somewhere to land.
At first the pilots said nothing to the passengers, and the silence worried Schlichter. After about 45 minutes, they announced that they would land in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and that everything was going to be OK. Three days later, Flydubai had still not named the two men.
Nearly four hours after take-off, the aircraft landed in Tabuk, where medical teams and security officials were waiting. All 180 people on board survived. Paduanelli called it “nothing but a miracle” that only the captain was hurt and that two extra pilots were on board.
Praise for the captain came quickly. Netanyahu saluted Machchhar “for his extraordinary bravery.” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised the captain’s courage, and on 2 October he called him to wish him a quick recovery.
On 3 October the UAE prosecutor general said the co-pilot had attacked the captain with the crash axe and called the incident a “terrorist attack”. Flydubai says the case is still under investigation, and Oman has not commented.
In his call with Netanyahu, the captain explained what had kept him reaching for the door while the blows continued and the plane fell. “I knew I couldn’t let the passengers die,” Machchhar said.