It was pure chaos on board flydubai’s flight FZ 1073. One of the pilots had been stabbed by another. The passengers pinned down the attacker. And there were blood stains all over.
Cruising thousands of feet in the air, the incident revived hijacking fears among the passengers. They had just one question: is 9/11 happening again?
One of them, identified as Daniel, said the plane made a steep dive with nose down during the confrontation. “It felt like, that’s it. It’s over. September 11 is happening again,” he told Channel 12.
Read : flydubai Hero Pilot Is Indian, Fought Off Colleague Who Stabbed Him: Sources
Nick Schifrin, defence correspondent with Newshour, also made a 9/11 reference. Citing senior Israeli officials, he said the Dubai-Tel Aviv flight incident was designed to be a “9/11-style attack”.
The 9/11 attacks were the worst terror attacks in the West. In the 2011 incident, four commercial planes were hijacked by al-Qaeda terrorists: two of these had flown into the World Trade Center twin towers. Nearly 3,000 civilians died in the four crashes.
Narrating the sequence of events on the flydubai flight, Daniel said he was alerted when he heard a fight happening in cockpit. He recalled seeing the cockpit door slightly open and an attempt to push someone out.
The aircraft suddenly went into a steep dive and an intense spin, he recounted, adding that he believed it was a terrorist attack. He said he heard screams and saw blood on the floor as the injured pilot was brought out of the cockpit.
Flight tracker data suggests the aircraft had lost over 14,000 feet in altitude within 37 seconds during the cockpit struggle.
Two other pilots soon took control of the aircraft, and the spinning then stopped, the passenger added. The plane safely landed at a Saudi airport, from where the passengers were flown to Tel Aviv.
Read : “He Attacked Us, We Overpowered Him”: Video Emerges From flydubai Plane
In its version of what actually occurred on Fly, Israeli authorities said one of the pilots tried to sabotage the aircraft’s systems. An Indian pilot, Captain Smit Machchhar, was stabbed when he tried to stop him. Some passengers and the crew members eventually broke into the cockpit and subdued the attacker.
The suspect has been arrested and is being questioned in Saudi custody, said Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The hijacking fears were also fuelled by the emergency code 7700 transmitted by the aircraft, which is the globally recognised signal for hijacking. Media reports suggest that Israel had scrambled military jets, anticipating a possible hijacking attempt. But this was ruled out after the distress code was changed to 7500, which indicates unlawful interference.
