On Wednesday, September 30, Flydubai flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv with 174 passengers on board, 166 of them Israeli. About two and a half hours after takeoff, with the Boeing 737 MAX cruising at around 34,000 feet, the co-pilot attacked the captain, Smit Machchhar, an Indian national, with a knife. The co-pilot is a terrorist of Omani origin and is now under investigation in Saudi Arabia. Some speculate that he meant to crash the plane, 9/11 style, into an Israeli city. Israeli journalist Guy Bechor says the target was an American air base in Saudi Arabia, home to US military personnel and several F-35s, considered the most advanced fighter jets in the world. That would have served two goals at once: killing Israelis (the Little Satan) and Americans (the Great Satan).
There is little doubt the plan came from Iran (see here). President Trump has said as much, but the connection has not yet been officially confirmed. What is not in doubt is that this was a terror attack in midair. But up there, in the sky, miracles happened too.
THIS IS THE STORY
Here is the sequence of events as we know it so far, based mostly on the accounts of the Israelis who were on the plane.
First, the terrorist, whose name has not yet been officially released and who, according to Prime Minister Netanyahu, “received Islamist indoctrination,” locked the cockpit door so no one could get in and he could take over the plane. He stabbed the pilot, Smit Machchhar, took the controls and turned the plane toward a high-value target to crash it. But Smit survived. Miraculously, while the terrorist was flying the plane, he found the strength and the presence of mind to open the cockpit door.
At that moment a passenger, Tzvika Manes (or his wife), was taking their little daughter to the bathroom and noticed that the cockpit door was half open and the pilot’s seat was empty. He alerted the other passengers. One of them, Yaniv Hayun, an Israeli plumber, went to see what was going on. Yaniv got into the cockpit and saw the wounded pilot. When the terrorist co-pilot saw Yaniv and realized the door was open, he began trying to wreck the controls so the plane would go down wherever it fell and, at the very least, kill everyone on board.
Hayun put him in a chokehold and, with the help of two other passengers, Tzvika and Assaf Arjuan, pulled him away from the controls. The fight was violent and the terrorist kept resisting, so they had to improvise. They tied his hands and legs with the plane’s headphone cords. There was nothing else at hand.
Meanwhile, with no one at the controls and the autopilot off, the plane went into a nosedive. The danger was not only that it would hit the ground. The enormous G-forces and the speed of the fall could have torn the fuselage apart or ripped off a wing in midair. In fact, that is what should have happened. The plane was dropping at about 30,000 feet per minute. According to a US military pilot who flies C-17s, aircraft far sturdier than any airliner, the breakup limit is 20,000 feet per minute.
During the fall the plane reached a ground speed of around 600 knots, close to the speed of sound. The Boeing 737’s maximum is 340. In every known case where a commercial plane came near those speeds, the tail broke off, the rear of the aircraft was destroyed, and everyone on board died. This may have been the greatest miracle of all.
As the plane plunged, Yaniv Hayun sat down at the controls. He was not a pilot. But not long before, miraculously, he had watched a documentary series, Air Crash Investigation (in Hebrew, Te’ufa BeChakira), and that bit of familiarity told him what to do: pull back on the yoke to level the plane and regain altitude. He did it just seconds before the plane would have gone into an unrecoverable dive.
One problem remained. Who would fly the plane and land it? The heroic pilot was badly wounded. A dentist on board, Dr. Shota Musaev, was treating him and managed to stop the bleeding, but the captain was in no condition to fly.
Miraculously, two off-duty Flydubai pilots were on the same flight as passengers, on their way to operate another flight. Thank God, one of them took the controls and steered the Boeing to the nearest airport, Tabuk, in Saudi Arabia, where it landed.
B”H no passenger and no crew member died. All 174 people on board, 166 of them Israeli, came out alive.
SEPTEMBER 30 AND OCTOBER 7
There is one more thing I think we need to stress. That instinct, the refusal to sit and wait for the problem to solve itself, the urge to run toward danger when lives are at stake instead of waiting for someone else to act, is one of the main reasons our people, Am Israel, survives, and thrives, in the State of Israel. Most people in the modern West behave like bystanders. The Israeli Jew is trained to step in when the stakes are high. The Israelis on that plane did not wait for the crew to come save them. They walked straight into the lion’s den. It is impossible not to compare what happened on this plane with what happened on October 7. When, for reasons that are still hard to understand, the army failed, the air force failed, and the security systems failed, thousands of Israelis risked their lives, and many lost them, to stop the Hamas invasion. Without them, without those who acted on the Jewish instinct for survival, the invasion would likely have spread much further and the death toll could have been even higher. When lives are in danger, the Israeli, who in most cases has gone through excellent army training, is ready, mentally and physically, to act and save lives. Today I heard that several people have posted something on social media that struck me as very telling: “On every flight I take, I’ll make sure there are at least one or two Israelis on board. That way I’ll feel safer.”
HEROES IN THE SKY
We tend to think of miracles as events in which the laws of nature stop working. But many biblical miracles are not like that. Human beings act in a completely natural way, and then the Creator performs the miracle. Nachshon walks into the sea, and God splits it. Shimshon fights the Philistines, and God helps him. Elisha tries to save a child’s life, and God brings the boy back from certain death.
Every miracle that happened on this flight began with a human act. God’s intervention shows itself in full when we look at the whole sequence. Then we realize that on the Flydubai flight, human forces and the Forces of Heaven worked together perfectly.
