FlyDubai’s hero captain revealed new details about his fight to save the passengers of Flight FZ1073 during an emotional phone conversation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, released through his office on Saturday evening.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
Captain Smit Machchhar told Netanyahu that he felt he had “one more fight left” when, in critical condition, he reached the cockpit door again to save all 174 passengers and 6 crew members, while the co-pilot continued to attack him and place the plane in a steep defensive position.
He described how the attack began by saying 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 strong blow to the back of my head. My first thought was that catastrophic damage had been done to the plane and something was wrong, but the blows kept coming, then I realized it wasn’t the plane… it was the other guy who was in the cockpit with me,” the captain described.
Machchhar said his vision became very blurry from the blows and he felt the plane go into a steep descent. He attempted to open the cockpit door again, but the co-pilot continued to close it while the passengers attempted to enter using the access code.
Netanyahu asked him if the door was closed by a pin mechanism and the captain replied that inside the cockpit the door had a rotating handle and that from the outside it could be opened with a code.
Machchhar remembers hearing the whistling sound of the plane plunging downward and the screams of the passengers.
Realizing what was happening, he told Netanyahu how he grabbed the internal twist handle and, with “a sharp, quick turn,” he finally managed to open the door, letting in the passengers who overpowered the co-pilot and stabilized the plane.
The captain said that the co-pilot “locked the cockpit door and I was lying on the ground. I heard people screaming. I realized that I had one last fight left: if I don’t do it, 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 he was a hero with “incredible courage, inviting him and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to light a flame of celebration on Israel’s upcoming Independence Day, the highest honor usually reserved for Israeli citizens.”
“You are a true hero of the brave people of India and Israel, and you are a hero of the entire world. I wish you a very speedy and full recovery,” Netanyahu told Captain Machchhar.
Israeli Ambassador to the UAE Yossi Shelley was at his bedside during the call and, along with Netanyahu, invited Machchhar and his family to visit Israel as soon as he can, to receive the embrace and love that the whole country wants to give him.
Dubai Crown Prince and UAE Defense Minister Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid also visited Machchhar in hospital, praising the captain’s courage, saying he “embodied the highest degrees of courage, responsibility and concern for human life.”
“From us, as well as from the nation’s leaders, he receives our full appreciation and praise. We are proud that he is part of our team, that he is part of our nation’s history and that he is 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.
On Sunday, British newspaper The Telegraph reported that FlyDubai’s flight co-pilot, named by several media outlets as Omani national Hamam al-Hammami, had studied aviation at the UK-based Buckinghamshire New University.
The Telegraph said that during his time at university, al-Hammami commented in social media posts that women should be “trampled on” and praised giving a woman a “pre-emptive slap”. He also appeared to welcome Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Telegraph reported.
The co-pilot used an ax on the captain and “attempted to carry out a terrorist attack”, the UAE Attorney General said on Saturday, while the UAE President’s diplomatic adviser Dr Anwar Gargash called the incident a “dangerous terrorist act”.
On Sunday, regional officials said UAE authorities shared with Israel a list of passengers and crew before the FlyDubai flight, including their nationalities, raising new questions about how the attacker evaded detection, the Associated Press reported.
According to AP, which cited regional officials, Israel did not raise any alarms against any passengers or crew members.
The Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, said the Transportation Ministry was responsible for checking passenger lists on foreign flights. Transport Minister Miri Regev told Israeli public broadcaster Kan that security agencies are responsible for flight safety and that her ministry had not received any passenger lists or warnings.
Sharing the list is a standard aviation procedure. But the head of aviation security at the Transport Ministry, Dvir Rubenstien, told Army Radio that the ministry relies on local security checks and does not have the tools or capacity to screen every passenger on every flight.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Israel has long-standing agreements with foreign airlines to prevent pilots from flying into the country if they are citizens of countries that do not have diplomatic relations with Israel.
It is also unclear how FlyDubai, a low-cost Emirati airline that operates flights between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, failed to identify the Omani pilot as a security risk and allowed him to fly the sensitive route to Israel.
As elections approach later this month, some opposition candidates have used security failures to highlight what they see as negligence on the part of Netanyahu and his supporters. Transportation Minister Miri Regev is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party and a strong supporter.
“This is exactly what the collapse of the system looks like,” Yair Golan, head of the opposition Democratic Party, wrote on X. “A Transport Minister who completely abandons our skies and a Prime Minister who abandons national security.”
The United Arab Emirates is leading the investigation, and security agencies from four regional countries, including Israel, were working to establish the co-pilot’s motivations, with help from the United States and other Western governments, according to the AP.
Gn world
