Screams, blood, desperate fight: How terror turned to triumph on flydubai flight

Screams filled the Dubai-to-Tel Aviv FlyDubai flight as passengers feared they were about to die. The cockpit was splattered with blood and the aircraft plunged thousands of feet in a matter of seconds, leaving those on board staring at the terrifying possibility that they might never reach their destination.

Passenger Miriam Ohayon captured some of those terrifying moments aboard flydubai flight FZ1073, turning her phone camera on herself as she sat visibly tense amid the chaos unfolding around her.

It was one of the extraordinary emotional arcs inside the flight, which was carrying 174 passengers and eight crew members on Wednesday, when the Omani co-pilot attacked Indian Captain Smit Machchhar with a fire axe, leaving him severely injured.

"I’m not going to die. I’m going to see my mom,” she can be heard saying in Hebrew, as fear took over the cabin and the aircraft continued its terrifying descent, while inside the cockpit, the desperate struggle unfolded.

One of the passengers who had rushed into the cockpit to help thwart the attack emerged triumphantly. The cabin erupted in cheers and applause, as passengers released the fear that had gripped them only moments earlier.HE'S STABBING HIM

Elsewhere inside the aircraft, another family was confronting the same fear in a far more immediate way.

Tzvika Manes and his wife, Tali, were near the cockpit with their six-year-old daughter when Tali suddenly screamed, "He's stabbing him."

Manes then heard his daughters crying. They told him, “Dad, we don’t want to die.” For him, those words became the trigger that made him storm the cockpit.

Manes, two other passengers, Asaf Rajuan and Yaniv Hayun, and an off-duty pilot rushed towards the cockpit. What they found inside was a scene of blood and chaos.

Captain Machchhar had been severely injured by his co-pilot. But despite losing blood, he had managed to unlock the cockpit door. That gave the passengers their chance.

They pulled the injured captain to safety before overpowering the attacker and tying him up. The aircraft was pulled out of its dive.NEW: footage released of Israeli passengers at the moment they pull the pilot out and rescue him from the attacker (the copilot) who was stabbing him.https://t.co/F7ku2ZncM8— Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) October 1, 2026

For Rajuan, however, the enormity of what had happened was still difficult to absorb.

“You don’t think about what you’ve done,” he said, adding that there was no time to think about the scale of the danger, or about the people aboard the aircraft.

“You just go and do it, almost like a mission,” Rajuan said.

Only later, he added, would they understand what their actions had meant. “As the days go by, we’ll understand that we managed to save many lives.”ATTACK UNDER PROBE

The attack is under investigation, with authorities examining the circumstances and the co-pilot's motive.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that the Omani co-pilot had undergone radical Islamist indoctrination and appeared to be suicidal.

"We have constraints that say you can't have pilots from countries that don't have diplomatic relations with Israel. So obviously he was able to go through that," Netanyahu told Fox.

Asked if there was any indication of Iranian involvement, Netanyahu said it was too early to say. There have been no official suggestions from Israel of Iranian involvement.

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz said on Wednesday that Israel's preliminary information indicated that the co-pilot aimed to crash the plane, describing him as a terrorist, though Netanyahu only described it as "a serious security incident."

The UAE has also launched an investigation to establish the circumstances and motives and determine whether the incident was linked to terrorist activity or involved prior planning or direction.

Meanwhile, Captain Machchhar is hospitalised in the UAE and is recovering well, according to the Indian Embassy.- Ends