A pilot stabbed another pilot and then apparently tried to crash to aircraft carrying dozens of Israelis on Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said. Passengers and crew subdued the attacker and the plane eventually made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.
Netanyahu said that Saudi Arabia had arrested the pilot of a FlyDubai flight.
“I salute these heroes who showed exceptional resourcefulness and courage. They saved many lives and prevented a major disaster,” said Netanyahu in his Wednesday statement.
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The flight traveling from the United Arab Emirates to Israel landed safely. But Israel believes there may have been an attempt to attack Israelis, and an investigation is ongoing, an Israeli official said earlier.
Around two and a half hours after leaving Dubai, the plane sent an emergency alert, according to publicly available flight tracking information.
The flight abruptly descended from 33,000 feet to 17,000 feet in about the space of a minute, before making an erratic circle close to the Jordanian border and eventually landing in Tabuk about an hour later, according to Flightradar24.
Video footage circulating on social media and reviewed by The Associated Press shows two men on the floor of the plane, with bloody wounds. Two people appear to be providing emergency medical treatment, while two others guard the cockpit. “We are guarding the pilot,” one person says in Hebrew. In another video, passengers weep and cry out in distress as the aircraft shakes.
The aircraft’s captain and the first officer were injured and taken to the hospital, according to a statement from the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Airport in Tabuk carried by the Saudi state-run Alekhbariya television. Passengers were receiving medical attention from local authorities, according to a regional official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.
There was apparently a fight between the pilots
An Israeli official said a fight broke out between two pilots, one of whom was armed with a knife. A second regional official briefed on the incident also said a fight broke out in the cockpit and apparently involved pilots.
“The crew have been questioned as part of the investigation,” the regional official added but did not say if anyone had been detained. They said it wasn’t immediately clear what caused the fight.
Another official confirmed that Israel had scrambled warplanes, fearing a hijacking. The three officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident was under investigation.
Passengers screamed when they heard a fight
Yasmin Abukasis, whose daughter was on the flight, said her daughter told her in a phone call that she could hear someone screaming “help!”
Abukasis added that her daughter said the plane started to lose control, causing passengers to scream in fear. She said eventually two people — who she said were pilots — were able to wrest control of the plane, while other people attempted to subdue an attacker on the floor of the plane.
She did not say who the attacker was.
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Passengers told Israel’s Channel 12 by phone that they also heard shouts from those sitting closer to the front of the plane who heard an altercation between the pilots, and the plane dipped steeply before landing in Saudi Arabia.
The airport in Tabuk reported that a FlyDubai flight made a distress call at 8:44 a.m. local time, before landing safely at 9:45 a.m. local time.
FlyDubai confirmed that flight FZ 1073 en route to Ben Gurion Airport experienced an incident and landed in Tabuk on Wednesday.
“Our teams are working closely with the relevant authorities,” the carrier said.
Israelis were targeted in a string of hijackings and airplane attacks by Palestinian militants in the 1960s and 1970s. Israel has not experienced a hijacking in decades but maintains some of the strictest airport security in the world, including on Israel-bound flights.
The emergency landing in Saudi Arabia was not the first for a plane carrying Israelis home. The kingdom does not have formal diplomatic ties with Israel, but ended its longstanding ban on Israeli flights overflying its territory in 2022. Since then, Saudi Arabia has coordinated multiple emergency landings for Israeli passengers, including in 2023 when a plane experienced an electrical malfunction.
The UAE has become a popular vacation destination for Israeli tourists since the countries normalized ties in 2020. FlyDubai is the lower-cost sister carrier of Emirates airlines.