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 agreed and, in his words, “out of respect for him, I didn’t look back.” He kept his eyes forward. “After 4-5 minutes, I felt a heavy blow to the back of my head.” At first he thought something had gone catastrophically wrong with the aircraft itself.
Machchhar, an Indian pilot, was the captain and pilot flying of Flydubai Flight 1073, a regular service from Dubai International Airport 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, an Omani, who was the pilot monitoring. According to passenger accounts, al-Hammami struck and seriously wounded the captain with the cockpit crash axe and sent the plane into a steep descent, in an apparent attempt to hijack and crash it.
The flight had climbed to 34,000 feet after leaving Dubai, according to Flightradar24. About two hours into the journey, tracking data showed the aircraft quickly losing height and turning sharply to the north. The jet fell 16,000 feet in about 30 seconds. Alberto Paduanelli, an aviation instructor who owns ALPA Simulation in southern England, recreated the descent in a flight simulator for Reuters. He said the autopilot disconnected before the plunge began, so the jet accelerated rapidly, and that the experience would have felt like a “vertical roller coaster”. In a sudden drop, he explained, passengers feel negative g-force, and for anyone without a seat belt, “Your body will literally lift from the seat.”
Inside the cockpit, Machchhar was being hit again and again. He later told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he nearly lost his vision under the co-pilot’s repeated blows. While al-Hammami kept attacking him and kept the aircraft diving, the captain, in a critical state, 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 of the flight deck. On Flight 1073 the danger was already inside. Machchhar managed to open it, and that allowed passengers to intervene.
In the cabin, screaming passengers had discovered what was happening at the front. They said the co-pilot was attacking the captain over and over, and that there was blood everywhere. When the badly wounded captain unlocked the door, a passenger grabbed the co-pilot and pulled him out, and others fought with him until he was under control. UAE aviation authorities later confirmed that passengers had helped the crew bring the incident under control before the diversion. Video verified by CNN shows the aftermath: a seriously wounded pilot lying on the floor of the aircraft, his face in pain and partly covered by a mask.
The plane still had to be flown, and here the flight had an unusual piece of luck. Two pilots in uniform were on board as passengers, not working the flight. Daniel Schlichter, who sat in the second row, told the Associated Press why they were there. “That not in every flight they bring two extra pilots,” he said. “In this case, they brought them because they should have brought the plane back from Tel Aviv to Dubai, and this is the only reason they were there.” Airlines call this practice deadheading.
Schlichter was not sure where the two men had come from, but he remembered how fast the first one moved. “He acted really like a hero, taking over the plane and reacted like he understood exactly what is going on, and I think we owe him our lives not less than the other heroes that went on the flight,” he said. Once the pair were inside and the door was closed again, he could not see who did what. It took “quite a lot of minutes,” perhaps 10 or more, to stabilise the aircraft after a descent so extreme that part of its rudder was torn away. A mayday call went out as the men searched for somewhere to land. Al Jazeera also described someone on board it called the “plumber”, who for a time took charge of the plane’s control panel.
Not everyone in the cabin was immediately relieved. After the aircraft levelled out, the pilots said nothing to the passengers, and that silence frightened Schlichter. “After they managed to stabilize the airplane, actually they did not have any communication with us, and I have to tell you, I was worried about this,” he said. He feared the men might be “hijacking the plane into maybe Iran, or I don’t know where, because we’re actually not too far.” After about 45 minutes, the pilots announced that they would land in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and that everything was going to be OK. Schlichter decided to trust them. As of 3 October 2026, three days later, Flydubai had still not named the two men, calling them only on-duty crew members travelling on the plane.
Air traffic controllers in Tabuk received a distress call asking for an emergency landing, and as the jet approached, its transponder switched to code 7700, the signal for a general emergency. Nearly four hours after take-off, the aircraft landed in Tabuk. Medical teams and security officials were waiting for the wounded attacker, the bleeding captain and everyone else on board. The plane landed at Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Airport, and all 180 people aboard survived. Paduanelli, looking back at the flight through his simulator, called it “nothing but a miracle that nothing was hurt apart from the captain, unfortunately, and that two pilots were onboard.”
Praise for the captain arrived quickly. On the day of the attack Netanyahu wrote: “My salute to the Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar for his extraordinary bravery.” Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised the captain’s courage, and on 2 October he called Machchhar to wish him a speedy recovery. Speaking from his hospital bed in that conversation, Machchhar described the moment he understood he had to get up again.
The investigation now turns on the other man in the cockpit. 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”. An official told CNN that one of the main questions was why the crew included a pilot from a country with which Israel has no diplomatic relations. According to regional officials quoted by the Associated Press, the UAE had shared a list of passengers and crew with Israel before the flight, and Israel had raised no concerns about anyone on it. An Australian counterterrorism team is examining his links to that country, where sources say he studied at a university in Melbourne. Flydubai says the circumstances are still under investigation, and Oman has not commented.
In his call with Netanyahu, released on the evening of 3 October, the captain explained what had kept him reaching for that door while the blows continued and the plane fell. “I knew I couldn’t let the passengers die,” Machchhar said.