What We Actually Know About the Cockpit Attack That Nearly Killed 180 Israelis
Around 180 people, 27 of them children, were ninety minutes into an ordinary morning flight from Dubai when the screaming started and the airplane began dropping out of the sky. By the time it was over a pilot had been stabbed, Israeli fighter jets were airborne, and a flydubai flight to Tel Aviv packed with Israeli families was sitting on a runway in Saudi Arabia.
Here is what is established, what is still only being reported, and what nobody should be claiming yet.
We also know who was in that cockpit. The first officer accused of trying to bring the airplane down is an Omani national, and the captain he attacked is a citizen of the United Arab Emirates. Two Gulf Arab pilots, on a Gulf Arab airline, flying Israeli families home to Israel, and one of them went for the other with a blade. Early reports in several outlets described the two men as Ukrainian and Russian. Those reports were wrong, and they have since been corrected.
What happened on the flydubai flight to Tel Aviv?
Flight FZ1073 left Dubai a little after 7:00 in the morning, bound for Ben Gurion Airport. Somewhere over Jordanian airspace the transponder began sending squawk 7700, the code for a general emergency. Then it switched to 7500. That is the code for unlawful interference, and in plain language it means hijacking.
The aircraft came down out of cruising altitude fast. Passengers describe hearing screams, then feeling the airplane fall. One told Israeli media that the cockpit was opened and there was blood inside, and that a pilot had been stabbed with a pocketknife. A passenger named Noam said the airplane suddenly began losing altitude and the cabin panicked. Crew and passengers got the door open together, restrained the man, and the airplane was brought back under control. It landed safely at Tabuk in northwestern Saudi Arabia. flydubai confirmed that the aircraft had landed safely at Tabuk and that all passengers were safe and accounted for, said it was working closely with the relevant authorities, and started arranging onward travel to Israel. Nobody on board was reported killed. Baruch Hashem.
Because 7500 on an inbound flight to Tel Aviv is the worst sentence in Israeli air defense.
An Israeli security official put it plainly that morning: they were unable to establish contact with the pilot, and that was concerning. So the air force raised its alert level and put jets up. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz convened an urgent consultation. Police opened a joint command center with the security services. The airplane was not going to be cleared into Israeli airspace until somebody knew what was on it, and investigators were ready to search the cargo hold and question the crew the moment it was on the ground. Every one of those decisions was correct, and anyone calling it an overreaction has never had to make the call with two hundred lives in the balance.
Was this a terror attack or a fight between two pilots?
The first hours produced the phrase "altercation between the pilots," by the afternoon Israeli officials had moved. Israeli outlets including Channel 12 reported that Israel is now treating the episode as an attempted terror attack, on the assessment that the first officer stabbed the captain repeatedly, tried to take control of the aircraft, and put it into a deliberate high speed dive. A senior Israeli official said a very serious disaster had been averted.
Israel is right to begin from the assumption of an attack and work backwards from there, because of what is already on the record rather than what anybody suspects. A man who stabs a captain with a blade and pushes a loaded airliner toward the ground is not having a workplace disagreement. Whatever the investigation eventually says about his state of mind, the act itself was an attempt at mass murder, and the people he was trying to kill were overwhelmingly Israeli civilians flying home.
Why does it matter that a plane full of Israelis landed in Saudi Arabia?
A Gulf carrier was flying Israelis to Tel Aviv. When it declared an emergency, the nearest safe runway belonged to Saudi Arabia, a kingdom that still has no formal relations with Israel. Tabuk took the airplane. The Israelis on board were looked after. Saudi authorities coordinated, the Emiratis coordinated, and Israeli officials worked the phones with both to get their citizens home while the Prime Minister's Office said the incident was under control and every measure was being deployed to bring them back. Before the Abraham Accords there was no flydubai route to Tel Aviv, no planeload of Israeli families over the Arabian peninsula, and no realistic diversion field for them if something went wrong. The Accords are not only a signing ceremony and a set of photographs. On a morning like this one they are the difference between a safe landing and a funeral.
There is one more detail that says a great deal about how much has changed. The investigation is running in Saudi Arabia, and Israeli intelligence agencies are taking part in it. Israeli services working a case on Saudi soil, over an attack on a Gulf airliner carrying Israeli civilians, belongs to a Middle East that did not exist a decade ago.
Investigators in Saudi Arabia, the Emirates and Israel will want the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, and those will answer the questions that eyewitness accounts cannot. Expect a hard look at how a blade reached a flight deck at all, and at the rules governing how long one pilot can be alone with the controls. Expect other airlines to quietly revisit their own cockpit procedures this week. Somebody tried to turn a flight full of Jewish children into a news bulletin this morning. He failed because the passengers he wanted to kill refused to sit still.
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