New Details Reveal Extent of Hijacked Flight Miracle

Wednesday’s hijacked flight from Dubai to Eretz Yisroel, which plunged from the sky and came dangerously close to crashing, ended safely with a landing in Saudi Arabia. As passengers arrived in Eretz Yisroel and shared details of what unfolded aboard the plane, the magnitude of the miracle is becoming increasingly clear.

After being repeatedly stabbed by the Omani co-pilot, the captain managed to release the secured cockpit safety latch before collapsing. That last action left the cockpit accessible to those outside. At just that moment, the wife of one of the passengers was taking her young daughter toward the lavatory when she heard screams in the cockpit and immediately alerted a crew member nearby.

Several Israeli passengers rushed forward and forced their way inside, where the attacker was trying to sabotage the plane’s systems. Netanyahu later said that one of the passengers involved told him, “The plane went into a spin and began to dive,” and that he and a crew member managed to enter the cockpit and neutralize the stabbing pilot while he was trying to damage the systems.

By then, the plane was plunging at an extraordinary rate, losing nearly 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds. Passengers described it as losing control, spinning and sinking, with those aboard convinced that they had only moments left before impact.

Before the trained pilots elsewhere aboard could reach the cockpit, Yaniv, one of the Israelis who had rushed forward, grabbed the controls himself. “I pulled the controls upward and stopped the plane’s dive,” he later said, adding that what he had learned from watching a plane documentary was what gave him enough understanding in those seconds to know to pull the controls up.

Another complete flight crew happened to be traveling on the same plane, because regional rerouting could have extended the original crew beyond its permitted duty time. They were elsewhere in the cabin when the attack began, and one passenger ran toward the rear of the plane to get them while the emergency was still underway. Initially frozen by what was happening, one of the pilots had to be shaken into action before making his way forward.

By the time the new flight crew on board entered the cockpit, the dive had already been arrested, and the attacker had been pulled away from the controls. The passengers who overpowered the attacker kept him restrained for the rest of the emergency, using headphone and charging cables, and kept him controlled while the other crew worked to bring the plane down.

The attacker had tried to destroy or disable the controls needed to keep the plane flying and land it safely. Footage from inside showed damage to the controls and physical damage to the plane, including damage described to the rudder and wing. Despite the attack inside the cockpit, the plunge and the damage, the plane remained controllable.

The fear inside the cabin was intense, and passengers had begun preparing themselves for death. One woman recalled, “We felt that this was it, we were about to crash. I was already screaming Shema Yisrael. I said, ‘I can’t die. I’m my mother’s only daughter. I can’t do this to my mother.’”

Another passenger said she had reached the point where she no longer expected the plane to recover. With around 30 children aboard, her thoughts were simply that whatever was coming should happen quickly so they would not suffer. “I wanted the fire to come already, just so it wouldn’t hurt,” she said, later describing “perfect unity” among the passengers throughout the crisis.

Even during the chaos, the flight managed to transmit 7700, the general emergency code, followed by 7500, the international code for hijacking or unlawful interference. Israeli Air Force fighter jets were scrambled as contact with the flight was lost and it disappeared from civilian tracking for a period, before communication was eventually established and the additional crew brought the plane into Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

All 174 passengers survived the hijacking, including around 30 children. When they later returned to Eretz Yisroel, MDA teams waiting at Ben Gurion Airport reported that none of the passengers required urgent medical treatment, including the two passengers who had been bleeding after the struggle aboard the flight.