‘I grabbed the attacker’: Passenger describes how he helped subdue co-pilot suspected of trying to crash plane

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An Israeli man who was among the passengers who burst into the cockpit of a flight that had been hijacked by the co-pilot and was falling out of the sky on Wednesday described the dramatic rescue in a widely broadcast video interview.

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Yaniv Hayun was one of at least four Israelis who helped overpower the co-pilot, who, according to Israeli assessments, tried to crash the aircraft with 174 passengers on board. Flydubai Flight 1073 was en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv when it dropped 17,000 feet in less than two minutes.

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Initial assessments indicate it was a foiled terror attack, according to a statement from Israel’s Embassy in Canada.

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Hayun said he believes the captain who had been stabbed by his Omani co-pilot managed to push open the cockpit door before he collapsed. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later praised the pilot, Captain Smit Machchhar for his “extraordinary bravery.”

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“I grabbed the attacker, put him in a chokehold and pulled him out. I called the Israelis who were with us, jumped back in and pulled the controls. I started pulling them back,” Hayun, his shirt still stained with blood, told Netanyahu in the video interview.

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Hayun, who quickly emerged as the hero of the FlyDubai incident, said he knew what to do because he watches Air Crash Investigation, a Canadian television show.

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The plane began a sharp descent from 34,000 feet roughly two hours and 20 minutes after takeoff, and briefly entered a nosedive over the desert near the Saudi-Jordanian border. It lost half its altitude in less than two minutes, The Washington Post reported.

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Hayun, who has an aviation background, said the attacker had been trying to damage the aircraft’s instruments in order to disable the plane.

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He believes the wounded captain managed to unlock the cockpit door after he was attacked.

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“He was very close to the door, and that made it difficult for us to open it,” Hayun said. “My conclusion is that he managed to open it for us before he collapsed.”

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Israeli dentist Musaev Shota, another passenger who helped subdue the co-pilot, told ynet, an Israeli news site, that he ran forward after hearing shouting, helped bind the attacker and then treated the bleeding captain.

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Shota said the group tied the suspect’s hands and legs after he continued struggling and later provided emergency treatment to the wounded pilot. Another passenger who was a pilot landed the aircraft.

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“The plane began to level out, and then (one of the other pilots aboard the plane) told me he was taking control,” said Hayun.

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The aircraft “sent distress signals and abruptly reversed course near the Saudi-Jordanian border before making an emergency landing at a civil-military airport in Tabuk, in northwestern Saudi Arabia, at about 9:45 a.m. local time,” The New York Times reported.

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Videos shot aboard the flight appear to show some terrified passengers hunkering down in their seats, screaming and crying as several men on the plane moved forward to subdue the jet’s co-pilot.

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Some passengers crouched in the aisle, as if in prayer, and children called for their mothers as the plane, plunged thousands of feet before the aircraft was brought under control and diverted to Saudi Arabia.

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Agence France-Presse reported that passengers knew instantly that something was wrong when the plane began plummeting from the sky in a rapid dive.

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It was like “we were having very big turbulence, but there was no turbulence,” passenger Almog Italie told AFP, describing the sensation of losing thousands of feet of altitude in seconds as similar to riding a rollercoaster.

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“The other passengers from the front took over control,” he told the news agency via video call from Saudi Arabia’s Tabuk, where the plane landed safely following what passengers described as a violent attempt by one pilot to kill the other.

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Still, Italie said, “people kept calm.”

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One female passenger described the “very stressful” moment people realized the plane was descending, according to a BBC report. “We understood the pilots lost control,” she told Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom.

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Yasmin Abukasis told Reuters that her daughter — who was on the flight — said a man holding a knife had forced one of the pilots onto the floor, and that there was blood everywhere.

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Speaking from Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, she said her daughter phoned her to say she heard screaming on the plane as a pilot called for help, adding that two other pilots took control of the plane as other passengers ran towards a man who had a knife.

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“The plane start to lose control. So all the people, they scream, they think they are going,” Abukasis told AP news agency.

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One of the passengers who helped subdue the assailant was Zvika Mans, CEO of Bank Leumi’s underwriting company, Barak Leumi, an investment-banking operation.

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“It was an incredibly traumatic event,” Mans told financial outlet Calcalist.

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“My wife was standing near the cockpit because my daughter was in the bathroom. Suddenly, she heard shouting coming from the cockpit. She shouted to a replacement pilot from Fiji who was sitting there: ‘Get in quickly, see what’s happening,’” he continued.

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“He called for help, and two others and I entered the cockpit and subdued the attacker. I’m covered in blood. It was insane,” the CEO recounted.

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He noted that the reserve pilot who landed the airplane was from Fiji, the stabbed pilot was from India, and the attacker was from Oman, according to the Jewish News Syndicate.

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Miryam Shira Ohayon, who was also on board, described the aircraft as being “pretty much out of control” as the fight ensued.

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“The co-pilot tried to murder the pilot and basically carry out a suicide attack on the plane,” she told reporters by speaker phone held up by her mother, who was waiting at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv.

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“It was really on the way to crashing, and it was simply the resourcefulness of many people who took control of the co-pilot and neutralized him,” she said.

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Ohayon noted “there was also a doctor who gave first aid, and people who treated both of them. Other than the pilot, there were no injuries, but the bigger fear was really a crash, which is exactly what he was trying to do.”

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Video of the aftermath circulating on social media shows blood smeared on the plane’s interior walls and several passengers as people tried to comfort a wounded man lying near the cockpit. Both the pilot and co-pilot were taken to hospital.

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Netanyahu in a video statement credited passengers with preventing a disaster.

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Initial assessments “indicate a foiled terror attack intended to crash the aircraft with all passengers on board,” according to a statement from Israel’s Embassy in Canada.

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“While a catastrophic tragedy was averted, this severe incident must be understood and treated as if the attack succeeded. It serves as an urgent reminder of the ongoing threats faced by innocent civilians across the globe, who remain deliberate targets simply for being Israeli.”

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The embassy called the event an attack on the Abraham Accords, a set of agreements brokered under U.S. President Donald Trump in 2020 and widely heralded as a foreign policy success.

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They govern the normalization of diplomatic relations between Israel and countries that have historically been hostile to it.

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“This was not only an attempt on innocent lives, but a direct attempt by extremist forces to sabotage the vision of peace, stability, and regional normalization fostered by the historic Abraham Accords,” said the embassy’s statement.

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According to JNS, video from aboard the aircraft showed passengers singing “Am Yisrael Chai” (“The people of Israel live”) moments after the plane landed safely in Saudi Arabia.

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