‘One last fight left in me’: Smit Machchhar recounts Flydubai cockpit horror

Attack from behind

“And suddenly, after I think I would say about 4-5 minutes, there was a big blow to the back of my head. My first thought was that there was catastrophic damage to the aircraft, and something is not right. But then after that, the blows kept coming one after the other, and that’s when I realised that it’s not the aircraft; it’s the other guy who was in the cockpit with me,” Machchhar said.

“I did try to stop him, but because of his initial blows, my vision was almost like nothing, and I was completely blurred out, and at that point, the next thought I had was that the aircraft was sharply going down. So my memory is still in bits and pieces right now, but this is what I remember from that time.”

Machchhar tried to open the door

“And I did try to; I did try and manage to open the door once, but I think he shut it back. And at this point, I remember I was lying down on the cockpit floor, and I felt the aircraft and the whooshing sound and people screaming. And as I was telling the ambassador here that I had that one last fight left in me. That, you know, call it personal or call it for people. But let’s say I did it. That if I don’t do it, I’m gonna die,” he said.

“And that’s when I pushed against everything. I gave everything that I had, and just went for the door and opened the door. And thankfully, people were waiting to pounce back and take over the control, and the rest is what you know, sir,” he told Netanyahu.

Omani pilot resisted

“The door from the inside has a twist-to-open mechanism, and from the outside it cannot. It can only be opened with a code. So my colleagues from outside were trying to…. but the guy was not allowing….”

Machchhar finally opens the door

“And the only way to open the door was to reach the knob, and like any other knob, just to twist it open, and it opens on its own. So there is no pin, but yes, the door. It was a short, quick twist, but the point was to reach that place, and once I had my hand on the knob, I guess I twisted it, and I opened it.”

Flydubai attack

Flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv on September 30 with 174 people on board, most of them Israelis. Midway through the flight, the Boeing 737 Max dropped sharply after co-pilot Hamam al-Hammami attacked the captain. Passengers and other crew took back control of the cockpit, and the plane landed in Tabuk, in northwest Saudi Arabia. Authorities in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Israel are now investigating.

Netanyahu has invited Machchhar and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to Israel for the country’s Independence Day, and called the pilot a “hero of Israel, India and the world”. He also said the co-pilot went through “Islamist radical indoctrination”. The UAE is looking into the facts, the motive and whether the attack was planned or linked to terrorism.