Machchhar tells Modi he opened the cockpit door after the co-pilot stabbed him

Capt. Smit Machchhar told India's prime minister, from a hospital bed in Abu Dhabi, that he was on the cockpit floor of Flydubai Flight 1073 when he recognised the Boeing was going down. He forced the door open. Passengers came in and held the co-pilot. The jet, carrying 182 people from Dubai to Tel Aviv, diverted to Tabuk in northwestern Saudi Arabia and landed.

The attack happened on Wednesday. Machchhar spoke on Friday, in a video call that Narendra Modi's office broadcast. He spoke in Hindi. The account is the first extended one from the captain himself, after two days in which Israeli officials, passengers and the airline described the sequence from outside the cockpit.

What he said he did on the floor

Machchhar said he had so many wounds that he had fallen. He was fighting for his life. At one point, he said, he realised that if he did not get up, the passengers would lose their lives. He also said that even with his eyes closed he knew what was happening in the cockpit, and that from the floor he could sense the aircraft was descending.

He told Modi he knew that if he could give the door one last push, that was the only chance, and that he was still taking a beating while he did it. He said he just managed to open it. Everyone else arrived, and they played their part. He was acting to save his own life, he said, and he knew he could not let everyone else die.

The Associated Press reported that he opened the cockpit door so passengers could enter and restrain the attacker as the Boeing 737 descended sharply. Witnesses and Israeli authorities gave the same outline. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the co-pilot was arrested after the landing in Saudi Arabia.

Who was on the flight, and where it went

Flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv with 182 people on board. Many of the passengers were Israeli, which is why the flight drew immediate attention in Jerusalem as well as in Abu Dhabi and New Delhi. The emergency landing was at Tabuk, not at the destination and not back at Dubai. Tabuk sits in northwestern Saudi Arabia, inside the airspace of a state that has no formal relations with Israel and that has been managing a separate war with the Houthis.

The co-pilot is an Omani national, according to Netanyahu's account as carried by the Associated Press. His motive was not established in the first statements. Netanyahu later said the initial investigation found that the co-pilot had gone through religious Islamic radicalisation, and that he was suicidal. An Israeli intelligence official confirmed those remarks to reporters. Israel's initial assessment, as described by outlets covering the Israeli side, is that he acted alone. Investigators are also looking at possible links to Iran. No public evidence for either the radicalisation claim or an Iranian link has been released.

What Trump and Netanyahu added on Thursday and Friday

President Donald Trump, asked whether authorities were looking at an Iranian connection, said they were working on it and that the other side was being open. He added that, based on what he was hearing, the answer was yes. He also said Iran would be struck very hard if links were confirmed. That threat sits next to a separate American movement of ships toward the Gulf, including the USS Theodore Roosevelt, which a US official described on Thursday. The two tracks are not the same decision. One is a criminal inquiry in Saudi custody. The other is a force posture in a war that began with US and Israeli strikes on Iran at the end of February.

Netanyahu's radicalisation claim does a specific piece of political work. It moves the case from a workplace attack by a colleague, which is how the first hours read, toward a security file that Israel can put beside the 7 October anniversary, which falls within days. The Indian embassy in Abu Dhabi said the ambassador had met Machchhar and his family and that the captain was in good health and recovering. That medical update and the political framing are travelling on different clocks.

Why the door matters

On a Boeing 737 the cockpit door is built to keep people out. After the 11 September 2001 hijackings, reinforced doors and locked-cockpit rules became standard on passenger jets. The design assumes the threat is in the cabin. Flight 1073 inverted that assumption. The person with the weapon was already inside, and the captain's usable act was to open the door he would normally keep shut.

Machchhar's account also fixes a timeline that passenger reports could not. He was conscious enough, while on the floor, to read the aeroplane's energy state. That is a training claim as much as a courage claim. Airline crews practise incapacitation of one pilot. They do not routinely practise a stabbing by the other pilot during descent, with the surviving pilot having to unlock the door for help. Flydubai has not published a full operational report. Saudi authorities hold the suspect. The Indian government has the captain. The public record, as of Friday night, is still those three partial files plus the video call.

The open question is evidentiary, not rhetorical. If Saudi and Emirati investigators produce a link to an outside handler, Trump has already said the response would be strikes. If they produce a lone attacker with no such link, the case stays a cockpit crime on a route that has carried Israelis through Arab airspace throughout the Iran war. Machchhar's door is shut again. The file is not.