Dramatic new details emerged Wednesday from the flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv that triggered a hijack alert, as passengers described screams, blood in the cockpit and a violent struggle between the pilots that sent the plane into a sudden plunge, and an Israeli official said there is suspicion one pilot tried to crash the aircraft.
Flight-tracking data shows the moment the crisis began. At 8:22 a.m., while over Saudi Arabia and about an hour from its scheduled landing at Ben Gurion Airport, the Boeing 737 MAX 8 suddenly dropped from its cruising altitude of 34,000 feet to about 16,000 feet in under two minutes, a descent of roughly five kilometers a minute, according to data cited by Haaretz. At one point, Flightradar24 recorded a momentary descent rate of nearly 31,000 feet per minute.
Only after the dive did the crew transmit the general emergency code 7700, followed minutes later by the hijack code 7500.
Passengers told Mako they heard screams from the front of the plane, and when the cockpit door opened, they saw blood. According to their accounts, one of the pilots had been stabbed with a pocketknife. Walla reported that one pilot lost consciousness after being stabbed. A passenger told British media that a nurse and a doctor on board gave first aid to the wounded pilot.
Israelis sitting near the front broke into the cockpit and helped stop the fight. Passenger Dalia Shpigel told Haaretz that those in the front rows forced their way in when they realized something was seriously wrong. "The Israelis neutralized the stabber together with the crew," one passenger told Mako.
An Israeli official told Ynet that there is suspicion one of the pilots wanted to crash the plane and that the other managed to subdue him with the help of the Israeli passengers. "The plane dived suddenly. This could have ended in disaster," the official said. A senior security official told Kikar HaShabbat that "a heavy disaster in the skies was averted today." Israel has not ruled out a security incident.
According to several Israeli media reports, the captain is Russian and the co-pilot Ukrainian. Flydubai has not publicly confirmed their nationalities or which pilot was wounded.
The plane landed in Tabuk at around 9:50 a.m. Passengers told Channel 12 they were kept on board afterward, surrounded by a heavy presence of Saudi security forces.
Flydubai said the flight "experienced an incident while en route" and that all passengers and crew were safe, adding that it was working with the relevant authorities. The airline's CEO told Israeli transportation officials that a replacement aircraft would be sent from Dubai to Tabuk to fly the 174 passengers, including 27 children, to Israel. The Prime Minister's Office said the situation was under control and that Israel was working to bring the passengers home.
Cockpit altercations are extremely rare in commercial aviation. In 2018, a Jet Airways pilot slapped his co-pilot on a London to Mumbai flight, and in 2022 two Air France pilots grabbed each other by the collar shortly after takeoff from Geneva. Neither incident involved a weapon.
