Captain Smit Machchhar did not think the request was unusual. The plane was flying over Saudi Arabia when his first officer asked whether he could pray in the cockpit. Machchhar said yes. As he later put it, “out of respect for him, I didn’t look back.” So he kept looking straight ahead. “After 4-5 minutes, I felt a heavy blow to the back of my head.” His first thought was that something terrible had happened to the aircraft itself.
Machchhar is a pilot from India. On 30 September 2026 he was the captain of Flydubai Flight 1073, and he was the one flying the plane. It was a regular service from Dubai International Airport to Ben Gurion Airport, which is near Tel Aviv. The aircraft, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, had 174 passengers and six crew on board. His first officer was Hamam al-Hammami, a man from Oman, whose job on this flight was to monitor the controls. Passengers say that al-Hammami attacked the captain with the cockpit crash axe, an emergency tool kept on the flight deck, and wounded him badly. He then put the plane into a steep dive. It appeared that he was trying to take control of the aircraft and crash it.
According to the tracking service Flightradar24, the plane climbed to 34,000 feet after it left Dubai. Roughly two hours after take-off, tracking data showed that it was losing height fast and making a sharp turn to the north. In about 30 seconds, the jet dropped 16,000 feet. Alberto Paduanelli is an aviation instructor and the owner of ALPA Simulation, a company in southern England. For the news agency Reuters, he recreated the fall in a flight simulator. According to him, the autopilot switched off before the dive started, and as a result the jet picked up speed very quickly. He said it would have felt like a “vertical roller coaster”. He explained that when a plane drops suddenly, passengers experience negative g-force, a feeling of being pushed upwards instead of down into the seat. For anyone not wearing a seat belt, he said, “Your body will literally lift from the seat.”
In the cockpit, the attacks on Machchhar did not stop. He later told Benjamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, that the co-pilot hit him so many times that he almost lost his sight. Al-Hammami went on striking him and kept the plane diving. Although the captain was in a critical condition, he reached for the cockpit door one more time. He said he felt there was “one more fight left” in him.
The cockpit door is designed to stop threats from entering the flight deck. On Flight 1073, however, the threat was already inside with the captain. Machchhar succeeded in opening the door, and this made it possible for passengers to step in.
Back in the cabin, passengers were screaming. They had realised what was going on at the front of the plane. They said the co-pilot was hitting the captain again and again, and that there was blood everywhere. When the seriously injured captain unlocked the door, one passenger seized the co-pilot and dragged him out. Other passengers then struggled with him until they had him under control. Aviation authorities in the UAE later confirmed that passengers had helped the crew get the situation under control before the plane changed course. CNN has checked a video that shows what happened afterwards. In it, a badly wounded pilot is lying on the floor of the plane. His face shows that he is in pain, and part of it is covered by a mask.
Someone still needed to fly the plane, and at this point the flight was unusually lucky. Two pilots in uniform were travelling as passengers, and they were not part of the working crew. Daniel Schlichter was sitting in the second row. He explained to the Associated Press why the two men were on board. “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.” In the airline industry, crew who travel as passengers in order to work a later flight are said to be deadheading.
Schlichter did not know exactly where the two pilots had come from, but he remembered how quickly the first of them reacted. “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. After the two men went in and the door was shut again, he could no longer see what each of them did. The dive had been so violent that part of the rudder, the moving panel on the tail, was ripped off. Getting the plane steady again took “quite a lot of minutes,” possibly 10 or more. While the pilots looked for a place to land, they sent out a mayday call, the international emergency signal. Al Jazeera also reported on someone on board it called the “plumber”. For a while, this man took over the plane’s control panel.
Not all the passengers felt relief straight away. Once the plane was flying level, the pilots made no announcement, and Schlichter found their silence frightening. “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 was afraid that the two men might be “hijacking the plane into maybe Iran, or I don’t know where, because we’re actually not too far.” After around 45 minutes, the pilots told the passengers that they were going to land in Tabuk, in Saudi Arabia, and that everything would be OK. Schlichter chose to believe them. Three days later, on 3 October 2026, Flydubai had still not given the names of the two men. The airline described them only as on-duty crew members who were travelling on the plane.
Air traffic controllers in Tabuk received a distress call requesting an emergency landing. As the jet came closer, its transponder, the device that identifies a plane to controllers, changed to code 7700, which signals a general emergency. The plane touched down in Tabuk almost four hours after it had taken off. Medical teams and security officials were waiting for the injured attacker, the bleeding captain and all the other people on board. The aircraft landed at Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Airport, and every one of the 180 people on board survived. After studying the flight in his simulator, Paduanelli said it was “nothing but a miracle that nothing was hurt apart from the captain, unfortunately, and that two pilots were onboard.”
The captain was praised very soon afterwards. On the day of the attack, Netanyahu wrote: “My salute to the Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar for his extraordinary bravery.” Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, praised the captain’s courage. On 2 October Modi phoned Machchhar and wished him a quick recovery. During that call, Machchhar spoke from his hospital bed and described the moment when he realised he had to get up again.
The investigation is now focused on the co-pilot. On 3 October the UAE’s prosecutor general said that the co-pilot had attacked the captain with the crash axe, and described the incident as a “terrorist attack”. An official told CNN that a central question was why the crew included a pilot from a country that has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Regional officials quoted by the Associated Press said that before the flight the UAE had given Israel a list of the passengers and crew, and that Israel had not raised concerns about anyone named on it. A counterterrorism team in Australia is looking into the co-pilot’s connections with that country. According to sources, he studied at a university in Melbourne. Flydubai says the circumstances are still being investigated. Oman has made no comment.
His conversation with Netanyahu was made public on the evening of 3 October. In it, the captain explained what made him keep reaching for the door while he was still being hit and the plane was falling. “I knew I couldn’t let the passengers die,” Machchhar said.