Flydubai FZ1073: Why the Jet Landed in Saudi Arabia, Not Israel, and Why the Terror Story Is Not Proven

Flydubai flight FZ1073 left Dubai at 7:05 on the morning of 30 September with a cabin full of Israeli travellers bound for Tel Aviv. Flydubai is the UAE’s low-cost carrier, the cheaper sister of Emirates, and since the Abraham Accords it has flown the Dubai to Tel Aviv route directly. Of the roughly 170 people on board, almost all were Israelis.

About two and a quarter hours in, with three quarters of the journey behind it and the Jordanian border close, the Boeing 737 MAX 8 fell out of the sky. According to the Al Jazeera flight timeline, it dropped from 34,000 feet, losing about 14,000 feet in under 30 seconds, climbed briefly and descended again to around 15,000 feet. Nobody dives a passenger jet that fast by choice. Passengers screamed, and the screaming came from the cockpit as well as the cabin.

Inside, the co-pilot had stabbed the captain, Smit Machchhar, an Indian national. Israeli passengers forced their way to the front, and off-duty flydubai pilots travelling in the cabin took the controls. An hour later the jet landed not in Israel but at Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Airport in Tabuk, in northwestern Saudi Arabia. Everyone survived.

That is the part the world has already heard. The stranger part began after the wheels touched Saudi ground.

The terror label comes from Israeli ministers, not from investigators. No government has published a motive, and Silent Dossier is not persuaded that this was a terrorist operation; a fight between the two pilots that spiralled out of control fits the known facts at least as well.

The flight recorders will settle it. Under the Chicago Convention’s Annex 13, Saudi Arabia, where the flight ended, leads the investigation, and it can hand all or part of it to another state.

The landing in Tabuk is the real political story: Riyadh treated and sheltered Israeli passengers, then refused Israeli military aircraft on its soil.

Israel will exploit this incident to the full, and its first targets are flydubai and the UAE, not Oman.

A jet’s transponder can broadcast three emergency codes, and pilots treat all three with dread. Squawk 7600 means the radio has failed. Squawk 7700 is a general emergency. Squawk 7500 is the most serious of all: unlawful interference, someone trying to seize the aircraft. A 7500 over a country’s airspace can bring its air force into the sky.

FZ1073 sent two of them. It transmitted 7700 near the Saudi and Jordanian border, and about seven minutes later switched to 7500. That code put three states on alert at once. The UAE had a hijack signal from a jet that had just left Dubai, one of the most secure airports in the world. Saudi Arabia had it over its own territory. Israel, with almost 170 of its citizens on board, assumed the worst and scrambled fighter jets.

The plane carried more pilots than the two flying it. Airlines routinely carry extra crew who are positioning for another flight or training, and on this route flydubai had added pilots so that a forced detour around closed airspace would not push the crew past their legal duty hours, a source told the Jerusalem Post. When the noise started, those spare pilots went forward. What they found looked like the end of a brawl: the captain stabbed and bleeding, and the co-pilot on the floor, stripped of his uniform shirt. With both men down, nobody was flying the aircraft.

Here the Israeli story acquires its hero. Yaniv Hayoun, an Israeli plumber in the front rows, helped drag the co-pilot away from the controls and pulled back on the yoke to level the plane until a relief pilot took over. When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received him and asked how he knew what to do, Hayoun said he watched Air Crash Investigation. Netanyahu said Hayoun had prevented “another 9/11”. Plumbing is an honest trade, but the man who actually brought 170 people down alive is the relief pilot who flew the damaged jet to Tabuk, and the captain who fought off a knife.

By the account attributed to the relief pilot, he did not know exactly where they were until he checked his screens and saw they were over Saudi Arabia. With an emergency on board and roughly an hour still to fly to Israel, the choice was Jordan or Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia was the safer option. He asked for Tabuk, and the passengers applauded when the wheels touched the runway.

Whatever the recorders show, Israel will exploit this incident as skilfully as it can. The narrative is already built: a Muslim pilot tried to kill Israelis. In the United States, bloggers and YouTubers dropped everything to talk about a cockpit fight between the UAE and Israel, and Israeli coverage has inflated the episode far beyond what is known.

The first targets are flydubai and the UAE, not Oman. Transport Minister Miri Regev accused flydubai of breaking its agreements by putting an Omani pilot on an Israel-bound flight, and Israeli officials have announced that foreign airlines may not assign pilots from countries without diplomatic ties to Israel to Israeli routes. Flydubai has suspended its flights to Israel. The nationality itself first came from Israeli officials; an unnamed Omani official later confirmed to CBS that the man was born in Oman and holds Omani citizenship, but Muscat has issued no public statement.

There is also a witness missing. The captain, the one man who saw everything from the seat next to the attacker, has not spoken publicly. Until he does, and until the recorders are read, nobody outside the investigation knows what happened in that cockpit.

The plane did not crash, but the aftermath is more dangerous than the incident. Israel’s relations with its Arab partners were strained before 30 September; the way it turns FZ1073 into a political weapon against the UAE, its pilots and Muslims in general will strain them further. Our earlier piece set out how Israel and the UAE described the cockpit attack, and the incident follows Netanyahu’s Abu Dhabi trip and the warnings that came after it.