UAE prosecutors say the flydubai co-pilot used the cockpit axe on flight FZ1073

UAE Attorney-General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said investigators had established that the co-pilot of flydubai flight FZ1073 tried to carry out a terrorist attack, using the aircraft's crash axe on the captain and trying to take the controls. The flight, from Dubai toward Tel Aviv, was diverted and landed at Tabuk in Saudi Arabia. The co-pilot, named in passenger accounts and news reports as Hamam al-Hammami, an Omani national, was taken into custody after landing. Captain Smit Machchhar, an Indian national and the pilot flying, was wounded.

There were 174 passengers and six crew on board. Of the passengers, 150 were Israeli citizens. Other flydubai pilots who were deadheading on the flight took over the landing after passengers restrained the first officer. The aircraft suffered structural damage to the rudder from overspeed in the dive.

The minute the aircraft fell

While the aircraft was near the Saudi Arabia-Jordan border at about 9:21 a.m., it dropped from roughly 34,000 feet to 17,000 feet in less than a minute. Speeds in the dive were estimated at about 600 miles an hour, or 970 kilometres an hour. A separate account of the same plunge put the loss at 16,625 feet in just over 30 seconds. The two descriptions are not identical. Both describe a descent steep enough to tear part of the rudder off. The crash axe did not have to be brought through security. It is kept in the cockpit for emergencies such as a fire or a forced landing.

Machchhar later told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the first blow to the back of his head felt, for a moment, like a failure of the aircraft. The blows continued. He realised the danger was the other person in the cockpit. His vision faded as the nose went down. He got the cockpit door open. The attacker shut it again. He was on the floor and could hear people screaming outside. A passenger, Tzvika, described Machchhar falling out of the cockpit with the first officer on top of him. A deadheading pilot whom passengers called James, together with Tzvika, Yaniv Hayun, Shota Musayev and Asaf Rajuan, tried to get in. Hayun said the captain's body was against the door.

What investigators have and have not said

Al Shamsi's statement, carried by the state news agency WAM and reported on 3 October, settled two points that the first witness accounts had left open. The weapon was the cockpit axe, not an object carried through the terminal. The prosecutor called the act an attempted terrorist attack. A Gulf diplomat, speaking to the Associated Press, said investigators were still asking whether al-Hammami acted alone or had a link to an extremist group. The Wall Street Journal reported that Oman had barred him from flying over concern that he had adopted extremist views. Neither the diplomat's question nor the Journal's account is a finding. The finding on the record is the attorney-general's: an attempted terrorist attack, with the axe, in the cockpit of FZ1073.

Khaleej Times on Monday reconstructed the cockpit sequence from the official account and from Machchhar's description to Netanyahu. The reconstruction does not add a new charge. It places the blows, the door, and the dive in one order. The open items are the ones the diplomat named: whether anyone else knew, and how a pilot Oman had reportedly grounded came to be the pilot monitoring on an Israel-bound flydubai flight with 174 passengers.

The aircraft is on the ground at Tabuk. The first officer is in custody. The captain survived. The rudder did not. The next public document that would move the story is a charge sheet, or a finding on the Oman grounding, neither of which has been released.