FlyDubai hero captain Smit Machchhar described to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu how the attack started and how he managed to finally open the cockpit door after nearly losing his vision under the co-pilot’s repeated blows. “I knew I couldn't let the passengers die,” Machchhar said.
The FlyDubai hero captain revealed new details of his fight to save the passengers aboard flight FZ1073 in an emotional telephone conversation with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, released by his office on Saturday evening.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
The UAE, which is leading the investigation, said the co-pilot attacked the flight’s captain with the cockpit’s crash ax and tried to take control of the plummeting plane in a “terrorist attack” on Wednesday.
Captain Smit Machchhar told Netanyahu he felt he had “one more fight left” in him when in a critical state he reached for the cockpit door once again to save the 174 passengers and 6 crew members, while the co-pilot kept attacking him and putting the aircraft in a steep defence.
He described how the attack started saying that the co-pilot asked to pray in the cockpit which he did not consider an unusual request and “and out of respect for him, I didn’t look back.”
“After 4-5 minutes, I felt a heavy blow to the back of my head. My first thought was that catastrophic damage had been caused to the plane and something was wrong, but the blows kept coming one after another, and then I realized it wasn't the plane... it was the other guy who was with me in the cockpit," the captain described the attack.
Machchhar said his vision became badly blurred from the blows and he felt how the aircraft went into a steep descent. He tried to open the cockpit door once again, but the co-pilot kept closing it while passengers were trying to get in using the access code.
Netanyahu asked him if the door was closed with a pin mechanism and the captain answered that on the inside of the cockpit the door had a twist handle and that from the outside it could be opened with a code.
Machchhar remembered hearing the whooshing sound of the aircraft plunging downwards and the passengers screaming.
Realising what was happening, he told Netanyahu how he reached for the internal twist handle and with “a sharp, quick turn” managed to finally open the door, letting the passengers in who subdued the co-pilot and stabilised the plane.
The captain said that the co-pilot "locked the cockpit door and I was lying on the floor. I heard people screaming. I realized I had one last fight left: if I don't do this, I will die with the last of my strength, I opened the door, and people were already waiting right outside and jumped in".
“I knew I couldn't let the passengers die,” Machchhar said.
The Israeli prime minister told him that he is a hero with “an unbelievable courage, inviting him and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi to light a celebratory flame on Israel’s next Independence Day, the highest honour usually reserved for Israeli citizens.
“You are a true hero of the brave peoples of India and Israel, and you are a hero of the entire world. I wish you a very speedy and complete recovery," Netanyahu told captain Machchhar.
Israeli Ambassador to the UAE Yossi Shelley was at his bedside during the call and together with Netanyahu invited Machchhar and his family to visit Israel as soon as he is able, to receive the embrace and love that the entire country wants to give him.
Dubai's Crown Prince and UAE Minister of Defence Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid also visited Machchhar in hospital hailing the captain’s bravery, stating that he “embodied the highest degrees of courage, responsibility, and care for human life.”
“From us, and from the leadership of the nation, he has our full appreciation and praise. We are proud that he is part of our team, part of the story of our nation and part of what the UAE stands for a nation of compassion, a nation of peace and a nation of life,” Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed said.
In a new development on Sunday, British newspaper The Telegraph reported that the FlyDubai flight copilot, named by multiple media outlets as Omani national Hamam al-Hammami, studied aviation at the UK-based Buckinghamshire New University.
The Telegraph said that during his time at the university, al-Hammami commented in social media posts that women should be “stomped on” and praised giving a woman a “pre-emptive slap.” He also appeared to praise Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, The Telegraph said.
The co-pilot used a crash axe against the captain and “attempted to carry out a terrorist attack”, the United Arab Emirates’ prosecutor general said on Saturday, while the UAE president's diplomatic adviser Dr Anwar Gargash called the incident "a dangerous terrorist act".
Meanwhile on Sunday, regional officials said that the UAE authorities shared with Israel a list of passengers and crew ahead of the FlyDubai flight, including their nationalities, raising new questions over how the attacker evaded detection, the Associated Press reported.
According to AP, who quoted regional officials, Israel hadn’t raised red flags on any passenger or member of the crew.
Prime Minister Netanyahu later told the head of the National Security Council to appoint an examiner to review “all security aspects regarding foreign civil aviation to Israel.”
The Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, said the Transportation Ministry is responsible for vetting passenger lists from foreign flights. Transportation Minister Miri Regev told Israel’s public broadcaster Kan that the security agencies are responsible for flight security and that her ministry wasn’t given a list of passengers or any warnings.
Sharing the list is standard aviation procedure. But the head of aviation security at the Transportation Ministry, Dvir Rubenstien, told Army Radio that the ministry relies on local security checks and does not have the tools or the ability to run checks on each passenger on every flight.
Prime Minister Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel has long-standing agreements with foreign carriers to keep pilots from flying into the country if they are citizens of nations that don’t maintain diplomatic relations with Israel.
It also remains unclear how FlyDubai, a low-cost Emirati airline that operates flights between Israel and the UAE, had failed to identify the Omani pilot as a security risk and allowed him to fly the sensitive route to Israel.
Ahead of the elections at the end of the month, some opposition candidates have seized on the security failures to highlight what they perceive as negligence on the part of Netanyahu and his supporters. Transportation Minister Miri Regev is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and a staunch supporter.
“This is exactly what system collapse looks like,” Yair Golan, head of the opposition Democrats party, wrote on X. “A transportation minister who completely abandons our skies, and a prime minister who abandons national security.”
The UAE is leading the investigation and security agencies from four regional countries including Israel were working to establish the co-pilot’s motives, aided by the United States and other Western governments, according to the AP.