The Copilot Terror Attack: He Was Flagged for Extremism and Still Got a Cockpit
A man who wanted to kill a planeload of Israeli families was sitting in the right seat of a Boeing 737, and the airline that hired him had no idea what it had put in the air. The flydubai copilot terror attack came within seconds of becoming the deadliest massacre of Israelis since October 7, and the warning about the man who tried it was written down years earlier by a different airline that chose to quietly move him to a desk instead of telling anyone.
His name is Hamam al Hammami. He is twenty nine, an Omani national, and on Wednesday morning he was the copilot of flydubai flight 1073 from Dubai to Ben Gurion airport. There were 174 people aboard, most of them Israelis, including small children. Roughly two hours into the flight he picked up the crash axe that sits in every cockpit for emergencies and started swinging it at the man beside him.
What actually happened on flydubai flight 1073?
The captain was Smit Machchhar, an Indian pilot with 17 years in the air, and his own account of it is the reason anyone knows how close this came. He took a blow to the back of the head without warning and went down bleeding, and while he was on the floor he realized the aircraft was descending, because al Hammami had reached the controls and pushed the nose over. The plane lost thousands of feet in seconds. The cabin crew could not help him, because the copilot had blocked the keypad that lets them in from outside.
So Machchhar got up, kept absorbing blows, and reached the door himself. "This is the last push, Smit," he remembered thinking. "The door is right there." He opened it, and a group of Israeli civilians came through. A plumber named Yaniv Hayun got hold of the copilot by the neck and held him until he was fully restrained, while an Israeli dentist named Shota Musayev worked on the captain with blankets and oxygen to stop the bleeding. Two other pilots who happened to be aboard took the controls and put the aircraft down safely at Tabuk in Saudi Arabia. Everyone on board walked off alive.
The United Arab Emirates has now said out loud what Israelis understood within hours. The UAE attorney general, Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, announced through the Emirati state news agency that investigators had established that the copilot "attempted to carry out a terrorist act," that he attacked the captain with the crash axe and then tried to take control of the aircraft. American outlets reporting on the investigation say al Hammami told investigators his intention was to crash the plane in Israel.
Why was a pilot flagged for extremism still flying the Tel Aviv route?
Here is the part that should make every frequent flyer on earth sit up, not only Israelis.
Al Hammami spent seven years at Oman Air. In 2024, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal, CNN and ABC News, Omani authorities barred him from flying over concerns that he held extremist views, and he had been caught with extremist material while he was still a trainee. He was pulled out of flight training and parked in an administrative job. It was also reported that he spent time in Syria.
A national carrier looked at this man, concluded he was a danger in a cockpit, and took him out of one. He left in February of last year, flew briefly for Royal Air Maroc, and by this year he was in a flydubai uniform working the route to Tel Aviv. A regional source told Fox News that flydubai never called Oman Air to ask about him before hiring him.
Social media accounts linked to him, since deleted, contained video of Israeli aircraft filmed from a cockpit alongside imagery of al Qaeda leadership. He had flown this route before, more than once. He was studying the target from the flight deck, and nobody with the power to stop him understood what they were looking at.
Prime Minister Netanyahu said the attacker had undergone Islamist radical indoctrination and boarded that aircraft intending to kill the passengers on it. Given what is now on the record, that is simply the plainest reading of the evidence.
Who actually stopped the flydubai copilot terror attack?
Look at where the protection came from on Wednesday. No background check saved that aircraft, and no watchlist or information sharing agreement between civil aviation authorities saved it either. It was saved by a wounded Indian captain who refused to stay on the floor, a plumber with strong hands, a dentist with a blanket, and two pilots who were supposed to be passengers that day. Everybody is calling them heroes, and they are. But heroes are what you get when the system has already failed, and a working system would have needed nothing more dramatic than one phone call between two airlines in the same small corner of the world.
For the first day, much of the international press called this an "incident," and some described an "altercation between the pilots," as though two colleagues had argued about the weather. One outlet was still running the phrase "mystery copilot" days later, when the mystery had already been solved by the man's own employment file. Al Jazeera went with the angle that the attack handed Netanyahu a useful security message ahead of an Israeli election.
Imagine a radicalized pilot flagged for extremist material trying to axe his captain to death and drive a packed airliner into London or Chicago. No editor on earth would be workshopping the word "incident" over that, or leading with what it did for a politician's polling. The vocabulary shrinks when the intended victims are Jews, and that reflex is worth naming every time it appears, because it is how a story this serious gets filed and forgotten inside a week.
Saudi Arabia, which has no formal relations with Israel, accepted an emergency landing of an aircraft full of Israelis, let them be cared for, and coordinated the aftermath. Netanyahu thanked the Saudis directly. The UAE took custody of the attacker and its own attorney general publicly called it attempted terrorism instead of reaching for a softer word to protect a carrier based in Dubai.
flydubai has suspended its Israel service while the investigation runs, and Israeli carriers are moving back onto the Dubai route. The airline should return, because surrendering that route is exactly what al Hammami wanted. It has to come back with something it did not have on Wednesday, though. Aviation authorities share information about faulty landing gear within hours, yet they have no reliable way of passing along the fact that a national airline grounded a pilot over extremist material. Israel happened to be the first country to discover that gap the hard way, and the gap itself sits on every route to every city.
Oman owes a full account of what it knew, when it knew it, and who it told. Israel should require any carrier flying into Ben Gurion to demonstrate real crew vetting rather than a signature on a form. And the rest of the world should stop filing attacks aimed at Jews as a regional curiosity with no bearing on anybody else.
A man who had already been judged too dangerous to fly got himself cleared to fly anyway, and the only thing between him and a mass grave in the sky was a bleeding captain and a few Israelis who refused to die quietly. Am Yisrael Chai. The next one will not announce himself either, and the only question worth asking is whether somebody finally makes the phone call before he straps in.
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