Passengers stop a flydubai co-pilot after he stabs the captain over Saudi Arabia

Passengers and a relief crew brought flydubai flight FZ1073 down at Tabuk on Wednesday morning after the co-pilot stabbed the captain and the aircraft dropped thousands of feet over northwestern Saudi Arabia. Israeli officials said the co-pilot had tried to crash the jet. More than 170 Israelis were on board the Dubai to Tel Aviv service. No passenger was reported seriously hurt.

Flightradar24 data cited by Reuters showed the aircraft descending nearly 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds before the first emergency signal. The BBC, using the same tracker, put the drop at more than 17,000 feet in less than two minutes around 05:21. Minutes later the transponder sent squawk 7700, the general emergency code, and then squawk 7500, the hijack code. The jet touched down at Tabuk at 06:58.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called it a highly severe security incident. He said an Israeli passenger told him the aircraft entered a spin and began to descend, and that the passenger and a crew member broke into the cockpit and overpowered the pilot who had carried out the stabbing. A Netanyahu spokesman told Reuters the wounded captain, covered in blood and on the cockpit floor, had clicked open the door release. A second pair of pilots, already on board to take the next sector, landed the aircraft. Israeli warplanes were scrambled while the jet was still in the air.

The captain is Indian national Smit Machchhar. The Indian embassy in Saudi Arabia said he was in a stable condition. Netanyahu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi both described him as a hero. The Times of Israel identified the co-pilot as an Omani who had worked for the airline for less than a year. Saudi authorities arrested him and are questioning him. Netanyahu said Riyadh would conduct the interrogation.

Passenger accounts filled in the minutes the tracker cannot. The Times of Israel named Assaf Rajwan as one of three Israelis who helped subdue the co-pilot. Video posted from the cabin showed a passenger in a bloodied shirt. One account said the captain was forced to the floor by a man holding a knife. The motive has not been stated by Saudi or Emirati investigators. Israeli officials have treated the act as an attempt to crash a plane full of Israelis, not as a cockpit fight that got out of hand.

The passengers spent about eight hours on the ground at Tabuk. Saudi Arabia then declined an Israeli request to send its own aircraft to collect them, Reuters reported. A flydubai replacement jet carried them on to Israel. The original aircraft stayed in Saudi Arabia with the co-pilot in custody and the captain in hospital.

The route itself is a product of the 2020 Abraham Accords and the later expansion of commercial flying between the Gulf and Israel. Flydubai has operated Dubai-Tel Aviv for years. The flight path crosses Saudi airspace, which is why Tabuk, in the northwest of the kingdom, was the diversion field once the crew declared an emergency. That geography also explains the political knot on the ground: an Israeli-bound jet, an Omani co-pilot, an Indian captain, and a Saudi airport that has no open diplomatic channel with Israel.

Two details will decide how the case is filed. The first is the cockpit voice and flight-data recorders, which Saudi investigators hold. The second is whether the co-pilot's actions after the stabbing match a deliberate attempt to push the nose down, as Israeli officials say, or a struggle whose effect on the controls was unintended. The altitude trace is not in dispute. A jet that loses 14,000 feet in half a minute is outside any normal descent.

Machchhar remains in Saudi care. The co-pilot remains in Saudi custody. The replacement aircraft reached Israel on Wednesday evening. The recorders have not been released.