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An Israeli pilot who was stabbed by his colleague aboard a Flydubai jet bound from Dubai to Tel Aviv prevented a disaster by regaining control of the cockpit and enabling passengers and crew to subdue the attacker, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday. The aircraft, carrying more than 170 people, was forced to land at Tabuk airport in north-western Saudi Arabia before the passengers were flown home.
The attacker has been arrested, according to the prime minister, who said the other pilot "apparently tried to crash the plane" during the incident on flight FZ1073. Almost all of those on board were Israeli nationals, and they were repatriated to Tel Aviv later the same day.
The wounded pilot has been identified as Captain Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, who was taken to hospital after the attack. Netanyahu described him as a "true hero" who showed "extraordinary bravery". In a post on X, the prime minister wrote that despite being stabbed and seriously injured, Machchhar fought back, resisted his attacker, and managed to open the cockpit door so that passengers and crew could overpower the assailant. "He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals," he added. India's embassy in Saudi Arabia said the captain was in a stable condition.
Details of how the drama unfolded emerged gradually, with the first reports giving a vaguer picture than the later official account. Initial media reports suggested a fight had broken out between the aircraft's two pilots, causing the rapid descent and the diversion. However, eyewitness accounts and Netanyahu's own account confirmed that one pilot had stabbed the other.
Netanyahu said an Israeli passenger told him the aircraft "went into a spin and began to descend" before the passenger and a crew member broke into the cockpit and overpowered the pilot who had carried out the stabbing. Two on-duty crew members who were travelling as passengers on the flight then took control and brought the plane down safely.
The timeline of the flight, reconstructed from tracking data, is striking. Flydubai's FZ1073 took off from Dubai International Airport in the United Arab Emirates at 03:05 GMT — 07:05 local time — with Ben Gurion airport in Israel as its destination. Roughly two and a half hours into the journey, data from the flight-tracking website Flightradar24 showed the aircraft descending rapidly over Saudi Arabia, losing more than 17,000 feet — over 5,000 metres — in less than two minutes.
Minutes later, the aircraft began signalling distress: first a general emergency code, squawk 7700, and then a squawk 7500 code reporting a hijacking, according to the tracking data. Around twenty minutes after those codes were transmitted, the plane turned back into Saudi Arabia and began a manual descent towards landing. The map published alongside the report shows it declared a general emergency at 05:31 and a hijacking alert at 05:38 before turning away from Tel Aviv, diverting south and touching down at Tabuk at 06:58. Less than an hour after the incident began, the aircraft returned to squawk 7700.
The response from regional air forces was immediate. Shortly after the incident, both the Israeli and Saudi Arabian air forces dispatched fighter jets, while Netanyahu held urgent consultations.
Flydubai confirmed the account in a statement, saying that "an altercation occurred in the flight deck" and that the flight "was successfully secured by on-duty Flydubai crew travelling on the flight, who diverted and landed the aircraft safely at Tabuk airport". An airline spokesperson added: "Our immediate priority is to ensure the ongoing safety, health, and wellbeing of all passengers and crew members involved in this incident and support the official investigation."
No official motive for the attack has been given. Unlike Netanyahu, who called the situation a "very serious security incident" in an address on Wednesday evening, Israel's defence minister, Israel Katz, went further, characterising what happened as an "attempted jihadist terror attack". Netanyahu said Israeli security forces were "maintaining close contact with the relevant authorities to ensure the continued safety of the passengers", but he did not assign a motive.
US President Donald Trump said he had spoken with Netanyahu following the incident, adding that it seemed as though the attacker was "perhaps a terrorist" — or that there were other reasons behind the attack.
Back in Israel, the passengers of FZ1073 arrived at Ben Gurion airport at around 18:40 local time, or 15:40 GMT. Crowds of onlookers met them with music, singing, dancing and waving Israeli flags. A paramedic from Israel's ambulance service told the BBC that a number of people were "very emotional and crying as they came off the plane".
One of those passengers, Yaniv Hayun, was among those who met Netanyahu, and told the prime minister how he and other people on board had helped restrain the attacker — an account that dovetails with the prime minister's own description of events in the cockpit.
The episode has raised fresh questions about cockpit security, the number of pilots on board a single aircraft and the procedures followed when a flight deck is breached mid-air, as well as about the coordination between civilian and military authorities during an emergency over a third country. The diversion to Tabuk also required close cooperation between Saudi and Israeli authorities at a moment of heightened regional tension, and the presence of fighter jets from both air forces underlines how seriously the incident was treated.
For now, the focus remains on the injured captain in hospital and on the investigations under way. The passengers are home, the aircraft is safely on the ground, and the man Netanyahu called a hero remains in a stable condition — but the questions raised by the "altercation in the flight deck" are likely to outlast the celebrations at Ben Gurion.
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