For a few minutes on the morning of September 30, Israel was getting ready to do the unthinkable: shoot down a passenger plane with 174 people on board, most of them Israelis, 27 of them children.
Now we know what the army calls that plan. It’s called “World Trade.”
Yes, as in the Twin Towers. The IDF’s order for a hijacked civilian plane is named after the deadliest hijacking in history, the exact scenario it exists to stop from happening here.
Ynet’s military correspondent Elisha Ben Kimon revealed the name on Saturday, ten days after the copilot of Flydubai flight FZ1073 stabbed his captain in the cockpit and, Israeli officials say, tried to crash the plane on its way from Dubai to Tel Aviv.
Here is how the order works. A plane heading for Israel sends a distress signal, like code 7500, which means hijacking. Fighter jets take off to meet it. Their job is to keep a bad situation from becoming a catastrophe, which means protecting the people on the ground and the country’s most sensitive sites, not only the people on the plane. If they can, they escort it to a safe landing. If they can’t, they have the ability to bring it down.
That morning, flight 1073 dropped thousands of feet, sent the hijacking code, and stopped answering. Nobody in Israel knew who was flying it. Two Air Force jets were scrambled to stay with it until someone decided what to do.
Israeli sources told CBS News last week just how far things went. The Air Force kept calling the cockpit and got nothing back. A committee that exists for this one scenario was pulled together. Israel closed its airspace. If the plane had kept coming, the jets were ready to cross into Jordan to get a look inside the cockpit.
And if the answer was bad, the call would have gone to Defense Minister Israel Katz and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Only Netanyahu could give the order. The sources were blunt about the logic: losing the plane would be better than letting it hit Ben Gurion Airport or the Azrieli towers.
He never had to choose. Passengers and crew overpowered the copilot, an Omani named Hamam al-Hammami, and tied him up. The plane turned around and landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. The jets came home. The captain, Smit Machchhar, survived.
The IDF says it trains for this all the time, and that most of the time the order has nothing to do with terror. A broken radio, a technical fault, or a pilot’s mistake can set it off too. Shooting down a civilian plane, the army stresses, is the most extreme decision there is, and it would only be made at the very top.
Flydubai’s flights to Israel are still suspended. Al-Hammami is being questioned in the UAE, with Israelis in the room.
