I generally hesitate to talk too much about aircraft accidents and incidents, because it’s not my primary area of expertise. But every so often, a story like flydubai 1073’s near disaster heading to Tel Aviv leaves me awestruck, and I just can’t help myself. While we certainly don’t have the full story yet, it is clear that there are many ways this could — and likely should — have ended in tragedy. Improbably, it didn’t.

We’ve all heard the basics of the story by now. Flydubai 1073 was scheduled to fly from Dubai (as the airline’s name would suggest) to Tel Aviv. As the airplane was over Saudi Arabia, approaching Israel, the first officer stabbed the captain and tried to bring the plane down. He did not succeed, and the plane safely landed in Saudi Arabia. Everyone lived.

There is so much more to this story that we don’t yet know, but there is already a lot to chew on. We need to go back to 2020 to set the stage.

In September 2020, Israel and the United Arab Emirates signed the Abraham Accords, normalizing relations between the two countries. With that came the opening of nonstop flights, primarily between Dubai and Tel Aviv.

UAE to Israel Flights by Airline and Destination

^{Data via Cirium}

In November 2020, flydubai was the first airline into the market. It has been the biggest airline to bridge the countries the entire time. Etihad has significant flying from Abu Dhabi, but when it comes to Dubai, flydubai has more than double the seats of the three Israeli carriers in the market combined. It has had years to develop its operation to Israel properly to follow all the rules.

Flying to Israel is not for the faint of heart. There are very strict security protocols in place that cover the entire operation, and it starts well before any flights take off. Obviously airlines flying into Israel have to be from a country with which Israel has diplomatic relations, but that extends to the pilots as well. Ex-pat pilots from other places can’t be in the cockpit.

On this particular flight, the captain was Smit Machchhar, an Indian national. That is perfectly fine under Israeli law. But the first officer, Hamam al-Hammami, was Omani and never should have been scheduled on this flight.

You would think that any potential security gaps in this process would have been fixed years ago, but apparently not. The Israeli government relies on airlines to self-police this pilot-origin rule. And clearly, flydubai wasn’t doing its job. I imagine there’s going to be hell to pay here, and the rules are going to change to require active Israeli enforcement.

The reason for these rules to exist is, of course, that there is a lot of hate crossing borders in the region, so it’s just one way that Israel can try to reduce the risk of a bad actor causing harm. That’s silly to think that there wouldn’t be people from India or the UAE or the US who would want to do harm to an aircraft flying to Israel, but this is all part of that “Swiss cheese” model that requires so many layers of security. In this case, it would have prevented this entire incident had it been followed.

So anyway, this first officer finds his way on to this airplane, and he reportedly had been pulled from flying at previous jobs because of his radical ideas. We don’t know the details, but I’m guessing that information does not cross borders. There isn’t a central pilot database warning other airlines about, well, anything. Remember the First Officer on that Atlas flight that crashed in Houston? He had flamed out at four other airlines. Things have improved within the US, but this is an argument for a global database, or at least a regional one. Al-Hammami is the last guy who should ever have been allowed in that cockpit, but he pulled it off. And he had clear intent to harm.

Once in the air, the plan appears to have been quite simple. With the cockpit door locked, he could take the crash axe meant to help exit the aircraft during an accident, try to chop up the captain, and then do something terrible with the airplane. Whether that was just to crash the airplane to kill those on board, use it as a missile as on 9/11, or hijack it for other purposes, we don’t know.

Airlines have taken some precautions to avoid mental illness bringing down an airplane. In the US, pilots have not been allowed to be alone in the cockpit for decades. Many European airlines adopted those rules after Germanwings 9525 was flown into a mountain after one pilot locked the other one out. But the general idea here is that we have to trust the pilots up front. They can have a gun or they can have access to a crash axe, because there are plenty of easier ways to take down an airplane when you’re flying it. But what happens when one pilot turns on the other?

There were three incredibly important things that happened here, and all some might call miraculous. Others might call this impressive training and character, while even others might say it was good luck.

First, once the captain had already been gravely injured, he had the wherewithal to unlock the cockpit door so others could enter. When the idea is that harm only comes from the outside, it creates opportunity for someone on the inside to more easily do harm. But when the captain unlocked that door he enabled others to come in and subdue the first officer. That effort alone was heroic.

Second, there were people onboard who could fly the airplane. Specifically, there were two deadheading pilots onboard who flew for the airline and were obviously checked-out on the aircraft. Apparently a plumber onboard was the first in the cockpit — this sounds only slightly worse than having Ted Striker fly your airplane — and he pulled back on the yoke. But you need a lot more than that to land an airplane, so those pilots were crucial, especially considering the third point.

Third, Boeing has built a tank of an airplane. The first officer put the aircraft into a plunge that no airplane should ever experience. It could have been catastrophic, but in this case, it was just damaged. That still makes it harder to recover, but finally we have some good news showing how well the MAX is built structurally to handle this beating. Take a look at this profile from Flightradar24 public data.

The airplane had been cruising at about 415 kts at 34,000 feet. There was some minor upset, but then things got dire quickly. At 5:21:48 (all times Zulu), the data shows the airplane at 33,225 feet going 387 kts. Forty seconds later, it was down near 18,000 feet pushing 600 kts. That is a descent of more than 30,000 feet per minute, well beyond any rational expectation on how this airframe would be used.

Remarkably, the aircraft was stabilized, but not before there was rudder damage and possibly more we haven’t heard about. But it held together, and those experienced pilots were able to get the airplane on the ground safely.

There is so much more that we need to learn about this, but already it makes for an incredible story. I’m sure we’ll have a limited series on Netflix soon enough.