Questions remain about how a pilot managed to sneak a weapon aboard a plane and stab his fellow pilot before it plunged thousands of feet in mere seconds. The attacker was thwarted, passengers said, and the plane made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.
“We were so scared. We didn’t know what was going to happen,” Aviatar Alevi, a 17-year-old student, told NBC News on Wednesday after he and the rest of the passengers were flown to Tel Aviv.
Here is what we know about the incident and how close it came to resulting in tragedy.
What did passengers see?
Alevi described a harrowing scene aboard the flight, with people “screaming, running, panicking, blood.”
“At the start, I thought it was a plane malfunction, but then I started hearing screaming about the stabbings,” he said.
“We didn’t know what was going to happen,” he said, adding that the possibility of death “was definitely an option.”
Another passenger, Motti Cohen Or, 70, said that he heard a woman shouting that “someone is stabbing someone in the cockpit” before the aircraft dived “toward the ground.”
Yaniv Hayun was pictured in a bloody T-shirt telling cameras he had been among those to enter the cockpit and subdue the attacking pilot.
At Ben Gurion Airport, after the passengers had returned to Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thanked Hayun, whom he later identified as a plumber.
Three others helped in the effort to save the plane and those aboard, Hayun told reporters. The group struggled to open the cockpit door. “I grabbed the attacker, and choked him, pulled him out first,” he said. “I started pulling the controls.”
“Thank God, we pulled it off. We really put our heads together and worked as a team,” he said. “It was between fear and a sense of a do-or-die situation.”
“We had to win. We had to pull through and come out on top,” he added.
FOR SUBSCRIBERSA harrowing ordeal aboard an Israel-bound plane
FOR SUBSCRIBERSThe debate over AI’s future rages on both coasts
FOR SUBSCRIBERSA harrowing ordeal aboard an Israel-bound plane
FOR SUBSCRIBERSThe debate over AI’s future rages on both coasts
Who is the hero pilot?
Hailed as a hero, Indian pilot Smit Machchhar was credited by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on X for saving “the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals.”
Even though he was bleeding heavily, Machchhar managed to unlock the door to the cockpit, Netanyahu told Fox News, allowing crew members and passengers to subdue his colleague and regain control of the plane.
The Indian Embassy in Saudi Arabia said in a post on X that he was admitted to hospital in Tabuk, where the plane landed, and was “reported to be in stable condition.”
According to his LinkedIn profile, Machchhar, who was also praised on social media by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, worked with India’s SpiceJet airline for more than 11 years before joining Flydubai. He has logged more than 9,750 flying hours, the profile says.
Machchhar trained as a pilot at Mainland Air in the New Zealand city of Dunedin for 18 months, beginning in 2008, the school’s CEO, Philip Kean, told the country’s 1News outlet. Machchhar “did very well” as a student and later returned to India where he worked as a recruiter for the school, Kean said.
What about the alleged attacker?
Few details have been released about the alleged attacker, including his name and his condition.
Two senior U.S. law enforcement officials briefed on the incident told NBC News that investigators say the pilot who began stabbing the other pilot is from Oman.
Omani authorities have not commented and the Omani Foreign Ministry and the embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment from NBC News.
Netanyahu said the pilot was being investigated in Saudi Arabia, where he was detained after the flight landed. Netanyahu added that he believed he would eventually be taken to the United Arab Emirates.
Was this an attack?
Based on the early results of the investigation, it increasingly looks like this was an act of terrorism, a senior American official and a Saudi Arabian official briefed on the investigation told NBC News.
However, the Saudi official cautioned that the investigation was still in its early stages.
No official statements on its investigations have been released by the kingdom.
The United Arab Emirates, which owns Flydubai, is also trying to determine “whether the incident was linked to any terrorist activity or purpose, or involved prior planning or direction,” the country’s state news agency reported Thursday.
Without providing any evidence, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said Wednesday that preliminary information indicated that the pilot whom he described as a terrorist aimed to crash the plane.
Netanyahu described it as “a serious security incident.”
Speaking in the Oval Office on Wednesday, President Donald Trump said he had spoken with Netanyahu “at length about this event.”
“It seems as though the co-pilot was perhaps a terrorist or perhaps a whack job, and he stabbed the pilot,” he said.
Was Iran involved?
There are no indications that Iran directed or was involved in the attack, a senior U.S. official briefed on the Israeli investigation told NBC News.
And there have been no official suggestions from Israel that the Islamic Republic was behind the attack. Two Israeli security officials told The Associated Press that Israel had not identified any Iranian involvement so far.
Does this alter anything for American flights?
There are “no credible threats” to U.S. airlines, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told a news conference Wednesday.
But he said the U.S. took every incident like this very seriously “and we continue to look at the procedures that we have in place, and continue to make sure the American people are safe.”
What questions remain?
Aside from his nationality, little is known about the pilot who carried out the attack or his motives for doing so.
Pilots undergo rigorous screening and it is standard for airlines to vet their backgrounds and check their criminal and employment history.
They also pass through metal detectors and checkpoints at airports, so it is unclear how he snuck a weapon aboard the plane. Netanyahu said in his interview with Fox News that Machchhar had apparently been stabbed or hit with an axe.
It also remains unclear whether air marshals were on board the flight at the time of the incident.
Saudi Arabia has warned that it is too early to draw definitive conclusions about who was responsible for the incident, and Israel and the UAE have announced investigations into what exactly happened on Flydubai Flight 1073.
