UAE says the flydubai co-pilot tried to crash Flight 1073 into Israel

Israeli officials said this week that the co-pilot of flydubai Flight 1073 told interrogators he meant to crash the aircraft into an Israeli airport. The attack itself was on 30 September. The Boeing 737 MAX was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv with 174 passengers when the first officer attacked the captain at about 34,000 feet. The aircraft landed at Tabuk in Saudi Arabia. Everyone on the passenger manifest survived. Flydubai has kept its Tel Aviv flights suspended.

The UAE attorney general, Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, said on 3 October that investigators had found the co-pilot "had attempted to carry out a terrorist attack." Reports have identified the suspect as Hamam al-Hammami, an Omani national, now in custody in the UAE. The captain, named in airline and Indian reporting as Smit Machchhar, is an Indian national. He was wounded, opened the flight-deck door, and passengers and two off-duty flydubai pilots pulled the attacker out of the cockpit.

The dive, in the data that has been described

Reconstructions published in Israel put the attack at about 9:21 a.m. local time, at roughly 34,000 feet. The nose was pushed down to an angle of about 39 degrees. A normal descent is near 3 degrees. In 92 seconds the aircraft lost about 17,400 feet. The steepest slice, between 9:21 and 9:22, took it from about 31,600 feet to about 16,600 feet, a drop of 15,000 feet in 55 seconds. Ben Caspit, speaking on 103FM, said the jet approached the speed of sound and saw G-forces past its operating limits, and that a hard pull-up in that dive would have broken the airframe. The aircraft held together. Two off-duty pilots then flew the damaged jet for more than an hour and landed at Tabuk at 10:45 a.m. UAE time.

A separate timeline carried by Israeli outlets has the crew transmitting 7500, the hijack transponder code, and records an Israeli Air Force scramble. The times in the two reconstructions do not match to the minute, which is what happens when one account uses cockpit data and another uses radar. Both agree on the shape: a sudden dive, a struggle, a diversion to a Saudi field, a landing with the passengers alive.

What the interrogation adds

The new element, in Dawn and Israeli reporting on 6 October, is intent as stated by the suspect. A dive can be a loss of control, a suicide, or an attempt to reach a target. Officials say al-Hammami described a target: an Israeli airport. That statement, if it holds, is what lets prosecutors use a terrorism charge rather than only an assault charge. It has not been tested in a courtroom. The UAE attorney general has already used the word terrorist. Israel has an interest in the destination. The reader has a named official conclusion and a reported confession, not a transcript.

The weapon described in the most detailed timelines is the cockpit crash axe, not a smuggled knife, though passenger accounts also used the word knife. A crash axe is standard safety equipment on the flight deck. Using it against the other pilot collapses the assumption that the locked door is the main defence. The door worked as designed. The attacker was already inside it.

What remains open

The aircraft is a nearly four-year-old 737 MAX 8. It is on the ground, or in a hangar, in Saudi Arabia or back under UAE control. The structural loads described by Caspit mean the airframe will be inspected before anyone flies it again. Flydubai's Tel Aviv schedule is the commercial consequence already in force. The legal consequence sits in the UAE, where the attorney general has framed the case, and in whatever Israel does with an interrogation conducted after a landing on Saudi soil. The open question is whether the confession about an airport was given under conditions a court will accept, and whether the flight-data recorder matches the 39-degree dive the Israeli reconstructions describe.