Yaniv Hayun had just helped drag the co-pilot out of the cockpit. Then he went back in.
The captain was on the floor, bleeding from wounds to his head and hands. The Boeing 737 MAX 8, carrying more than 170 people from Dubai to Tel Aviv, was still losing altitude over the Saudi desert. Mr. Hayun, a plumber, grabbed the control column and pulled back.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel later asked him how he knew to do that.
"Yes, I watch 'Air Crash Investigation,'" Mr. Hayun said. The television series reconstructs air disasters minute by minute.
On the morning of Sept. 30, Mr. Hayun and several other passengers did the work of the two men who were supposed to be flying the plane. One of those men had been attacked and wounded. The other was the man who attacked him, and he was trying to put the jet into the ground.
People familiar with the investigation have identified the first officer as Hamam Al Hammami, a 29-year-old Omani. He had been flagged before. The Wall Street Journal and The Associated Press have reported that Oman barred him from flying in 2024 over concerns that he had adopted extremist views. ABC News, citing intelligence and law enforcement officials, reported that he was found with extremist material while training as a co-pilot at Oman Air.
Flydubai hired him anyway. A source told Fox News that the airline never checked with Oman Air before doing so. Israel's government has separately ordered an inquiry into whether an Omani citizen should have been allowed to crew a flight to Israel at all.
Flydubai has not addressed the reports about how he was hired. At the authorities' request, it has suspended its flights to Tel Aviv "until further notice."
Twenty-Nine Seconds
Flight 1073 left Dubai at 7:05 a.m. local time. Most of the passengers were Israeli. Others came from India and the U.A.E., according to Israel's Foreign Ministry. The aircraft, registered A6-FKF, climbed to 34,000 feet and turned northwest across Saudi Arabia.
In the left seat was Capt. Smit Machchhar, 39, of Mumbai. He had close to 10,000 flying hours, about 11 years of them at the Indian carrier SpiceJet, where he rose to training captain. He joined Flydubai in June 2022. The first officer beside him had been with the airline for less than a year.
At 5:21 a.m. Greenwich time, a little more than two hours into the flight, the tracking service Flightradar24 began recording altitude fluctuations.
At 5:22:07, the jet was at 30,875 feet.
At 5:22:36, it was at 16,750 feet.
It had dropped 14,125 feet in 29 seconds, a rate of more than 29,000 feet per minute. A normal descent is roughly a tenth of that.
The plane pitched up sharply, then dived again. At 5:31, its transponder began broadcasting 7700, the general emergency code. Seven minutes later, the code changed to 7500, which signals unlawful interference with an aircraft. The jet crossed briefly into Jordanian airspace before turning back toward Saudi Arabia. Israel scrambled fighter jets.
'One Last Push'
Saudi Arabia said its initial investigation found that the co-pilot had assaulted the captain. Mr. Netanyahu said the attacker's aim was to crash the plane and kill everyone on board.
Captain Machchhar gave his own account two days later, from a hospital bed in Abu Dhabi, in a 10-minute video call with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India. It was the first time he had spoken publicly about the attack.
He was lying wounded on the cockpit floor, he said, when he felt the plane going down. "I was fighting for my life in that moment," he told Mr. Modi.
The cockpit door was within reach. He said he told himself, "One last push, Smit! Just do it," and opened it from the inside. Then, he said, everyone came in.
He said he recited the Hanuman Chalisa, a Hindu devotional hymn, to get through the pain and lift himself off the floor. He was thinking of the people on the other side of the door. "I knew I was not going to let others die," he said.
He broke down during the call and apologized to the prime minister for crying.
The Fight at the Door
Dan Zoler was in the cabin with his wife and their two young children. He told NPR that he watched three passengers throw themselves on the co-pilot.
The door was hard to push open, Mr. Hayun said, because the captain was slumped against it. Inside, the first officer was wedged between the two pilot seats, reaching for the controls.
Asaf Rajuan, another passenger who went forward, said in a statement released by Israel's presidency that he had acted on pure survival instinct.
The men hauled the first officer out of the cockpit. They bound his wrists with cables from the in-flight headphones, then with plastic ties. Mr. Netanyahu said the man screamed "Kill me" and appeared suicidal.
Back at the Controls
The plane was still losing height. That was when Mr. Hayun returned to the cockpit and pulled on the column. Mr. Netanyahu later told him he deserved a global medal of honor.
Trained pilots were a few rows back. Flydubai pilots had been traveling in the cabin as passengers. The airline said they took over the aircraft, diverted it and landed it. A spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu told Reuters that two off-duty pilots entered the cockpit and flew the plane the rest of the way.
The jet leveled off near 15,000 feet. It touched down at Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Airport in Tabuk at about 6:45 a.m. Greenwich time, some 85 minutes after it first left cruising altitude.
The Dentist on the Cockpit Floor
Shota Musaev, a Georgian-born dentist who lives in Israel, was flying home from China. He told The Times of Israel that he ran forward about 10 seconds after he heard screaming. He told Ynet that he went to fight a terrorist and did not expect to be treating a patient.
He helped hold down the first officer, then knelt beside the captain. Dr. Musaev said he was the only doctor on the plane. He said he stopped the bleeding from the captain's head and hands and stabilized his blood pressure. Captain Machchhar stayed conscious, he said, and told the people around him his age and that he had two children.
The passengers reached Tel Aviv that night on a replacement aircraft. India's Embassy in Riyadh said the captain was in stable condition in a hospital in Tabuk. The Indian government later described him as gravely injured but safe. On Oct. 1 he was flown to Abu Dhabi for further treatment. By the next day, online fundraisers in his name had raised nearly $80,000.
His family has not asked him about that morning. His wife, Sonal Machchhar, told CNN News18 that they did not want to bring the memories back.
Grounded in Oman
According to ABC News, Oman Air suspended Mr. Al Hammami from flying in 2024 after identifying him as a security risk. Sources told CBS News that Omani surveillance had flagged his visits to radical websites. They said the airline moved him to an office job and that he later resigned.
CBS's sources also said he was born outside Oman, to an Omani father and a Syrian mother, and had lived most of his life abroad. The Jerusalem Post reported that he holds no second nationality.
A source at Buckinghamshire New University in England told ABC that he earned a distance-learning degree in aviation management there in 2023. The source said he did no pilot training at the school.
It is not clear what Flydubai knew about any of this when it hired him, or what it asked.
A Question of Passports
His citizenship has raised a second question. Oman has no diplomatic relations with Israel.
Israel's transportation minister, Miri Regev, said that aviation arrangements between Israel and the U.A.E. restrict crews on Israel-bound flights to citizens of countries that have such ties. She ordered Israel's Civil Aviation Authority to examine whether Flydubai broke them.
Mr. Netanyahu told Fox News that the co-pilot appeared to have slipped through a loophole. Sources quoted by The Jerusalem Post said the agreement contains no such restriction. An Israeli official told CNN that the Omani pilot should never have been on a flight to Israel.
The Investigation
Saudi Arabia handed the first officer to the U.A.E. on Oct. 1. The Emirates claims jurisdiction because the aircraft is registered there. Prosecutors appointed by the attorney general, Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, are examining whether the attack had a terrorist purpose. The General Civil Aviation Authority is leading the safety inquiry. Saudi Arabia's National Transport Safety Center has opened its own.
An Israeli official told CBS that Israeli, Saudi and Emirati investigators are questioning the suspect together. A regional official told The A.P. that the United States and Oman are also involved. Oman has said nothing publicly.
Mr. Netanyahu has said the co-pilot underwent "radical Islamist indoctrination." Israeli security officials told Reuters that their initial assessment is that he acted alone. Investigators are going through his communications and contacts in the weeks before the flight. They are also trying to determine what blade he carried and how it got onto the flight deck.
Dr. Musaev said he did not know for hours whether the captain would survive. He learned it after landing, from the people who took Captain Machchhar to the hospital.
