Benjamin Netanyahu spoke by phone Saturday evening with Smit Machchhar, the Indian captain of a flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv who, according to accounts published by the Times of Israel, was beaten in his own cockpit by his copilot and still managed to get the door open so the people in the cabin could do the rest. Machchhar is hospitalized in the United Arab Emirates.
"You are a hero of Israel, you are a hero of India, and you are a hero of the entire world," the Israeli prime minister told him, in remarks posted by his office and quoted by the Times of Israel. Netanyahu went further and invited Machchhar, along with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to light a torch at Israel's next Independence Day ceremony. The paper noted the obvious caveat: the prime minister does not pick the torch-lighters by himself.
The flight was Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, Sept. 30. There were 174 people aboard, Israelis among them. All of them landed alive, which is the entire reason anyone knows the captain's name.
What Happened Above the Gulf
The outlines, as reported by the Times of Israel and echoed in regional coverage, are these: the copilot, an Omani identified in that reporting y— on the basis of an unnamed report — as Hamam al-Hammami, turned on the captain in flight. The aircraft went into a rapid descent. Machchhar ended up on the cockpit floor. The copilot, by the captain's account, blocked the crew outside from using the entry code, and the captain's first attempt to open the door failed. He could hear screaming from the cabin.
When the door finally came open, passengers and crew went in and overpowered the man. The jet diverted and landed safely in Saudi Arabia, according to The Week, though no airport has been named in the reporting reviewed for this story. Machchhar was seriously hurt.
Some of this is still unsettled, and it is worth saying so plainly. Accounts differ on whether the captain was stabbed or struck with a blunt blow to the head. The flight has been cited both as FZ1073 and simply as Flight 1073. The attacker's name, the claim that he had flown into Israel before, and a broader assertion that pilots from Iran, Syria and Iraq have operated airliners into Israel all trace to a single outlet citing an unnamed report. There is no published charge sheet, and no statement yet from flydubai, the UAE, Oman or Saudi authorities establishing a motive. Netanyahu and Israeli media have described the episode as terrorism; that characterization has not been confirmed by a prosecutor or an aviation regulator.
"It's Not the Aircraft"
The most human moment of the call came when Machchhar described the second he understood what he was dealing with. "That's when I realized that it's not the aircraft, it's the other guy who was in the cockpit with me," he said, according to the Times of Israel.
Netanyahu's answer: "It's a twist of fate… and it's a twist of faith, and what you did is remarkable."
The day of the attack, the prime minister had already posted on X that the captain "saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals." Netanyahu also met separately with a passenger who was among those who intervened, the Times of Israel reported.
The Security Question Nobody Can Dodge
Strip away the ceremony and there is a hard problem sitting on the table. A commercial crew member on a flight to Tel Aviv tried to crash a plane full of Israelis, according to the Times of Israel liveblog and Netanyahu's own account, and the only thing standing between that and a mass casualty event was one injured pilot's determination to reach a door handle.
Israel is reported to be preparing tighter vetting of foreign airline flight crews. That is a review Israeli officials will own, and it will raise uncomfortable questions about what screening existed before Sept. 30 and who signed off on it.
What comes next is procedural and slow: official statements from flydubai and the Gulf aviation authorities, a determination of which country prosecutes and under what law, an air-safety investigation, and word from India's civil aviation regulator and foreign ministry. And one smaller question that a lot of people will be watching for anyway — whether a captain still recovering in a hospital bed ends up holding a torch in Jerusalem.
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