Israel readied a shoot-down order for flydubai 1073 while 166 Israelis were on board

Two Israeli sources with direct knowledge told CBS News, in an account published Monday and updated Tuesday, that Israel was prepared to shoot down flydubai flight FZ 1073 on 30 September even though 166 Israeli passengers were on board. The Boeing 737 MAX 8, registration A6-FKF, was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv when the first officer attacked the captain in the cockpit. Had the aircraft continued toward Israel and reached a set distance, the sources said, fighters would have entered Jordanian airspace to investigate, under a standing procedure for a civilian aircraft treated as hostile.

The sequence in the air is now documented in more than one account. Captain Smit Machchhar, 38, an Indian national from Ghatkopar in Mumbai, was the pilot flying. He trained at Mainland Air in Dunedin, flew for SpiceJet for about 11 years, and joined flydubai as a direct-entry captain in June 2022. First officer Hamam al-Hammami, an Omani national who had been with the airline for less than a year, was the pilot monitoring. Around 9.21 am, at about 34,000 feet, al-Hammami attacked Machchhar with the crash axe kept in the cockpit and pushed the nose down. Preliminary flight data cited in Israeli reporting put the dive angle at 39 degrees, against about 3 degrees in a normal descent. In 92 seconds the aircraft lost about 17,400 feet. In the steepest 55 seconds it fell from roughly 31,600 feet to 16,600. The rudder was structurally damaged by overspeed.

Machchhar, wounded, opened the cockpit door. Passengers and flydubai staff restrained al-Hammami. Two off-duty flydubai pilots who were deadheading, one of them reported as British and named in some accounts as James, took the controls. They flew the damaged aircraft for more than an hour and landed at Tabuk in Saudi Arabia at 10.45 am UAE time. All 174 passengers survived. The Israel Air Force had tried to raise the cockpit and got no answer. Fighters were scrambled, Israeli airspace was closed, and the jets were recalled after the aircraft, still about 400 miles from Israel, turned toward Saudi Arabia. Saudi fighters then launched.

The shoot-down preparation is the new fact in the CBS account, not the dive. Israel convened what the sources called a predetermined committee and a command centre, the procedure used when a civilian jet may have been turned into a weapon. The recall came because the track changed, not because the committee stood down on principle. A jet that had kept the original heading, with a silent cockpit and a dive already flown, would have met fighters over Jordan under that plan. The 166 Israeli passengers were known. They did not, on the sources' account, veto the option.

On 3 October the UAE attorney general, Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, said investigators had found that the co-pilot had attempted a terrorist attack. Al-Hammami is in custody in the UAE. Images of Ayman al-Zawahiri and of the suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi were reported on his social media. Flydubai's Tel Aviv flights have stayed suspended. The investigation is shared between Israeli and Emirati agencies. A passenger video and the flight-data outline are the public record of the dive. The committee's minutes are not public.

The operational residue is the rudder. An aircraft that went to 39 degrees, lost 15,000 feet in 55 seconds, and still landed, did so with structural damage already done. Two deadheading pilots flew that jet for over an hour because the operating captain was wounded and the operating first officer was the attacker. That is a crew-resource fact as much as a security fact. The next document that would change the public account is either the UAE charge sheet or the Israeli record of how close the fighters came to a weapons order.