This morning a flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv appears to have been hijacked by its own co-pilot. It ended with the plane on the ground in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and all 174 passengers alive, among them 27 children and many Israelis. Very little has been officially confirmed. But what we do know points to a potentially massive disaster that was averted, thanks to the bravery of Israeli passengers and members of the crew.
Flight FZ1073, a Boeing 737, left Dubai just after 7 a.m. local time this morning, heading for Ben Gurion Airport. It’s one of the everyday routes that have linked Israel and the Gulf in recent years.
By an extraordinary piece of luck, an alternate crew was on board
About two hours into the flight, while cruising at around 34,000 feet over northwestern Saudi Arabia, the plane suddenly dropped about 17,000 feet. Its altitude and speed kept changing before it settled at around 15,000 feet. The plane’s transponder first broadcast 7700, the general emergency code. Then, briefly, it switched to 7500, the international code for unlawful interference, which in plain terms means a hijacking. It went back to 7700 before landing. That brief 7500 signal was enough to set off an Israeli military response. The Israeli Air Force scrambled fighter jets, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held urgent consultations with the Defence Minister Israel Katz.
At that stage even Israeli officials didn’t know what they were dealing with. A security official told the news outlet Ynet there was no definitive information about a hijacking and that they couldn’t make contact with the pilot.
The picture that has emerged since then comes mainly from people on board. Passengers say they heard screams coming from the cockpit. According to their accounts, passengers then forced the cockpit door open and found the Emirati captain stabbed with a knife, allegedly by his co-pilot. Israeli passengers and crew members subdued the attacker and helped save the captain’s life. One passenger told Channel 12 the plane began diving fast after the pilot was wounded. A video filmed on board afterwards, which I shared this morning on X, shows the stabbed pilot. It is graphic. One of the men on board has also recorded his own account of those moments, and it’s worth watching in full.
With one pilot wounded and the other restrained, someone still had to fly the plane. By an extraordinary piece of luck, an alternate crew was on board, being flown to a later assignment. Channel 12 reported that these off-duty pilots, in plain clothes, played a crucial part. They are reported to have taken over the controls and flown the aircraft to safety.
It’s still officially unconfirmed who attacked the captain and why. Reports so far point to the co-pilot. A senior Israeli official told Channel 12 there were ‘growing indications’ that the co-pilot tried to take over the plane in order to crash it, in what would have been a suicide attack with 174 people on board. Unofficial reports say the co-pilot is Omani and the captain who stopped him is from the UAE. None of this has been confirmed by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Oman, or flydubai.
The plane was diverted to Tabuk and landed safely. In a short statement, flydubai confirmed that all passengers were safe and accounted for. The airline said it was cooperating with the authorities and would give more information later. Reports say Saudi authorities are now questioning the suspect.
Only days ago Netanyahu was in the UAE. According to the Italian newspaper Il Foglio, during that visit he secretly met Saddam Haftar in Abu Dhabi. Haftar is the son and deputy of eastern Libya’s commander Khalifa Haftar. Senior officials from other Arab states that have no formal ties with Israel are also believed to have met Netanyahu that day, in meetings arranged by the Emiratis, now one of Israel’s closest partners in the region. Neither government has confirmed any of these meetings. But they show how much has quietly changed. Today’s flight connected two of those partners, it came down in a third country, Saudi Arabia, and Riyadh then allowed an Israeli plane in to bring the passengers home.
If the early indications are right, this morning a pilot tried to turn a passenger jet into a weapon on a route that stands for that new relationship. He was stopped by ordinary passengers who ran toward the danger instead of away from it, and by a crew who happened to be in the right place at the right time. We came very close to a very different headline today.
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