- 1 day ago
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:0034,000 feet above northern Saudi Arabia, fly Dubai flight 1073, Dubai to Tel Aviv, 174 passengers.
00:10In row 13, Adam Polo is flying home with his wife and their two young children.
00:15And then, he says, everything stops.
00:19The electricity, all of the multimedia system, and the air conditioning.
00:24The plane drops.
00:26Another passenger, Almogitali, later describes it like a massive turbulence for 20, 30 seconds, then balanced, and then once again
00:36dropped.
00:37On the flight tracking screens, it's falling more than 14,000 feet in under 30 seconds.
00:43Nobody in the cabin knows why.
00:46The answer is behind this door.
00:49On the other side, the captain is lying on the floor, wounded, and, by his own account, still being attacked.
00:57Later, he describes it.
00:59When I was lying on the floor, I could feel that the aircraft was plunging.
01:03And I said to myself, while I was getting beaten, this is the last push, Smit.
01:09Do it.
01:09The door is right there.
01:11This is the story of flight 1073.
01:15Of a door built after September the 11th to keep danger out, and a morning when the danger was already
01:22on the inside.
01:23Of a plumber who learned what to do from a TV show.
01:26A dentist who became the only doctor on board.
01:30A spare pilot nobody has named.
01:32And two control columns with nobody holding them.
01:35What happened in that cockpit?
01:38And how did the man in the right-hand seat get there in the first place?
01:45This film is built on official statements, flight tracking data, and the words of the captain and the passengers who
01:51were there.
01:52It's a story still moving.
01:54Where sources disagree, we'll say so.
01:58Wednesday, the 30th of September.
02:01Dubai International.
02:02Flight 1073 takes off at 5 past 7 in the morning.
02:07The aircraft is a Boeing 737 MAX 8.
02:11Registration A6FKF.
02:14Not yet 4 years old.
02:17On board, 174 passengers, according to Saudi and Israeli officials.
02:22More than 150 of them Israeli.
02:2527 children, the Aviation Herald reports.
02:29And sitting among them, as passengers, are two more Fly Dubai pilots.
02:34According to a source quoted by the Jerusalem Post,
02:37they're there in case a reroute pushes the crew past its legal duty hours.
02:41A routine precaution.
02:44Remember them.
02:45At the front of the plane is the flight deck.
02:48Two seats.
02:49Two control columns, one in front of each pilot, linked together.
02:53Move one, and the other moves with it.
02:56Behind them, a door.
02:58Since September the 11th, international rules have required it to be reinforced and kept closed and locked in flight.
03:05From the cabin, it's built to stop anyone forcing their way in.
03:09But from the inside, it's simple.
03:12Turn the handle, push, and it swings outward, into the cabin.
03:17Nothing is designed to stop someone in the cockpit from leaving.
03:20And on the back wall, behind the captain's seat, like on almost every airliner,
03:25hangs a piece of emergency equipment.
03:27A crash axe.
03:29It's there to pry open panels in a fire.
03:31Or to break a way out.
03:33A safety tool.
03:34Hold on to that.
03:36In the left seat, the captain.
03:38Smit Makshar, from India.
03:4039, a father of two, with, in his own words,
03:4417 years as a pilot.
03:4611 of them as a captain.
03:48In the right seat, the first officer.
03:51Omani, according to Israeli and Omani officials.
03:54With Fly Dubai for less than a year.
03:56No authority has officially named him.
03:59And neither will we.
04:00Further back, Yaniv Hayoun, who runs a sewage pumping business,
04:04is traveling with his wife and their two daughters.
04:07There's a dentist, Dr. Shota Musayev, on his way home from China.
04:11And a couple, Tzvika and Tali Manes.
04:14For two hours, nothing happens.
04:17One passenger calls it a very calm flight.
04:20Then, about 130 nautical miles northeast of Tabuk,
04:25the line on the tracking screen begins to move.
04:30Nobody outside that cockpit saw what happened in it.
04:34No recording has been released.
04:35So what follows is a reconstruction built from the investigators' first findings,
04:41the tracking data, and the words of the people who were there.
04:4421 minutes past 8, Saudi time.
04:47Two pilots, side by side, at 34,000 feet.
04:51According to the UAE's attorney general,
04:54the first officer began executing his plan.
04:57He attacks the captain inside the flight deck.
05:00The captain ends up on the floor.
05:02He's badly wounded.
05:04Head, hands, neck.
05:05And, the attorney general says,
05:07the first officer tries to take control of the aircraft's flight controls.
05:12The nose drops.
05:13In the steepest part of the fall,
05:15the tracking data shows the plane descending at more than 30,000 feet a minute.
05:20A plane like this has a speed it must never exceed.
05:24In a dive this steep, it can blow past that limit in seconds.
05:28Every 737 has a warning for this.
05:31A loud, mechanical clacking.
05:33Whether it sounded on this flight has not been published.
05:36In the cabin, people who were standing fall.
05:39Overhead bins open.
05:41The craziest roller coaster you ever did, says Adam Polo,
05:44but multiplied by a thousand.
05:46And from the front of the plane, people hear screaming.
05:50Tali Manis is near the front.
05:52She's the first to raise the alarm.
05:54One passenger tells NBC he heard that someone is stabbing someone in the cockpit.
05:59By her husband's account, she shouts to one of the spare pilots,
06:02get in quickly, see what's happening.
06:04But the door is shut.
06:06It was built so that nobody can force it from this side.
06:09On the other side of it, the captain is on the floor.
06:12He can feel the plane going down.
06:15Even if I shut my eyes, he later says, I can tell what is happening inside a plane.
06:20He's lying right by the door.
06:22And he's still under attack.
06:24This is the last push, Smit.
06:26Do it.
06:28Using what Israel's prime minister's spokesman calls the last moments of his energy,
06:33the captain clicks open the release.
06:36Somehow, I opened the door, he says, and everyone came in.
06:40This is what the first people through that door say they saw.
06:44The captain on the floor.
06:46The first officer standing over the control panel,
06:50bashing the control panel, according to the spokesman.
06:53And the two control columns, with nobody holding them.
06:57Two unmanned yokes, Yaniv Hayoun says.
07:00No pilots.
07:01Hayoun is one of the first through the door.
07:04I grabbed the attacker, he says, put him in a chokehold and pulled him out.
07:08Tzvik Amanes is right behind him.
07:10Three of us jumped on him with all our strength.
07:13Asaf Rajwan helps hold him down.
07:15So does the dentist, Shota Musayev.
07:18They have nothing to tie him with, so they use headphone cables.
07:21Later, zip ties.
07:24Passengers say that once he's held down, he says just two words.
07:28Kill me.
07:29And the plane is still falling.
07:32So Hayoun goes back in.
07:34A man who pumps sewage for a living takes hold of the controls of a Boeing 737.
07:40I jumped back in, he says, and pulled the controls.
07:43I started pulling them back.
07:45The plane began to level out.
07:47And then the pilot told me he was taking control.
07:50One of the two spare pilots, the ones who were only on board as a precaution, now has the aircraft.
07:57The Attorney General's office says the reserve pilots regained aircraft control.
08:02Fly Dubai has not named either of them.
08:04Even their nationalities differ from report to report.
08:07By 24 minutes past 8, AP's analysis of the tracking data shows the plane flying level at around 15,000
08:15feet.
08:15From the first wobble to a flat line, just over three minutes.
08:20It has lost more than half its altitude.
08:23On the floor, the dentist is now the only doctor on the plane.
08:27The captain's blood pressure, he says, plummeted.
08:30He loses consciousness.
08:32Musayev stops the bleeding.
08:34He was just praying the whole time, Musayev says.
08:38I was afraid we would really lose him.
08:41At around half past eight, the plane's transponder starts broadcasting 7700.
08:47General emergency.
08:50Minutes later, 7500.
08:53To every air traffic controller in the world, that means unlawful interference.
08:58Usually, a hijacking.
09:00Who set those codes hasn't been published.
09:03But on the ground, nobody can see inside this cockpit.
09:07All they can see is the code.
09:09In Israel, the military sees it too.
09:12Two Air Force fighter jets are scrambled.
09:15The chief of the general staff, Lieutenant General Eyal Zemir, holds an urgent assessment.
09:20According to Israel's Ynet, the military prepares for several scenarios.
09:25A crash in Jordan or Saudi Arabia.
09:27A hijacking with hostages.
09:30And the third?
09:31The jets head toward Jordan, Ynet reports, with the understanding that, if necessary, they might have to shoot down the
09:38aircraft.
09:39To prevent, it says, a 9-11 style attack.
09:43Inside, the fight is over.
09:45From outside, Flight 1073 looks exactly like a hijacked airliner, full of Israelis.
09:52And at 8.42, it turns west.
09:55Briefly, it crosses into Jordanian airspace.
09:58Why has not been explained.
10:00Two minutes later, Tabuk Air Traffic Control receives a distress call asking for an emergency landing.
10:07At 8.46, the plane turns almost all the way around, back toward Tabuk.
10:12Saudi Arabia has no diplomatic relations with Israel.
10:16Now, a plane full of Israelis is coming in to land.
10:20There.
10:22At a quarter to ten, Saudi time, Flight 1073 lands at Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz Airport in Tabuk.
10:30Nobody has died.
10:32On the passengers' own videos, you can hear them clapping and singing.
10:37Both pilots go to hospital.
10:39The captain, with serious wounds, and later stable after surgery.
10:44The first officer, hurt during the struggle, is arrested by Saudi authorities.
10:48Photos taken on the ground show what the dive did to the aircraft.
10:53A large part of the rudder, on the tail, is gone.
10:58One aviation analyst told Canada's Globe and Mail the plane was flown beyond its structural limit speed.
11:05Investigators have not said.
11:07In Tabuk, a video of a Saudi medic taking an Israeli passenger's blood pressure goes viral.
11:13Fly Dubai sends two replacement aircraft.
11:16That evening, the passengers land at Ben-Gurion, about ten hours late.
11:21Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is waiting.
11:24He embraces Yaniv Hayoun, who tells him how he knew what to do.
11:28I watch air crash investigation, Mr. Prime Minister.
11:32Netanyahu later posts a five-star review of Hayoun's business.
11:36Everyone is alive.
11:37But one question is now bigger than all the others.
11:41Who was the man in the right-hand seat?
11:44And how did he get there?
11:46In the first hours, the official words are careful.
11:51Fly Dubai calls it an altercation in the flight deck.
11:54The UAE's aviation regulator calls it a security incident.
11:59Saudi Arabia's interior ministry says the captain was assaulted by his co-pilot.
12:04Israel goes much further.
12:06Defense minister Israel Katz calls it an attempted jihadist terror attack.
12:12Then, three days after the flight, reporting from the Wall Street Journal, AP, and ABC News,
12:18all citing officials who aren't named, gives the first real picture of who the first officer was.
12:25Before Fly Dubai, he worked at Oman Air.
12:27And there, according to these reports, he'd been taken off flying duties over concerns he had adopted radical ideological views.
12:36He was moved to a desk job.
12:39ABC News, citing American officials, reports that two years earlier he'd been found with extremist material.
12:46Then, Fly Dubai hired him.
12:48A Gulf diplomat told AP that the background checks looked at whether he had been convicted of a crime and
12:55didn't go deeper.
12:55However, Oman has said nothing publicly.
12:59Fly Dubai hasn't responded to the claims.
13:01In Israel, it turns into a scandal of its own.
13:05The rules say pilots flying into Israel should come from countries with diplomatic ties to it.
13:10And Oman has none.
13:12Israel's Channel 12 reports that dozens of Omani pilots had flown to Tel Aviv anyway.
13:18Israel halts Fly Dubai flights for six days and starts vetting every pilot flying into the country.
13:24CNN reports something else.
13:27About nine hours after the incident, while the first officer was already in custody, a social media profile in his
13:34name posted cockpit videos zooming in on Israeli jets at Dubai airport.
13:40They ended with images of Al-Qaeda figures.
13:43CNN says it's unclear who posted them or whether they'd been scheduled in advance.
13:48And on the 3rd of October, the UAE's Attorney General, whose country is leading the investigation, gives his conclusion so
13:57far.
13:57The first officer, he says, attempted to carry out a terrorist act.
14:03And he names the weapon.
14:12For 25 years, the locked cockpit door has been the answer to one question.
14:18What if the danger comes from the cabin?
14:20On Flight 1073, the danger was already inside.
14:26Already armed, with the plane's own equipment.
14:29What saved the plane came from the cabin, once the captain let it in.
14:35As of the 3rd of October, no formal charge has been announced.
14:39He has not been officially named.
14:41The Attorney General says the investigation into his motives, and into any links, is still going on, until a court
14:49decides he is presumed innocent.
14:52So we know much more about what happened in that cockpit.
14:56The deepest why is still with the investigators.
15:01The day after the flight, both pilots are flown to Abu Dhabi, escorted by an Emirati security team.
15:08On the 2nd of October, from his hospital bed, Captain Smit Machjar speaks publicly for the first time, in a
15:16video call with India's Prime Minister.
15:18I couldn't let everybody else die, he says.
15:22I was trying to save myself, but I also knew that I can't let anyone die.
15:28Dubai's crown prince visits him in hospital.
15:31Strangers raise tens of thousands of dollars for him online.
15:35In Israel, the president nominates five passengers for the country's award for civilian heroism.
15:42A man who pumps sewage for a living, and watches air crash documentaries.
15:46A dentist.
15:48A woman who raised the alarm.
15:50A spare pilot nobody has named.
15:53And a captain on a cockpit floor, who made one last push for the door.
15:59On the tracking screens, the line still shows the drop.
16:03It can tell you how far the plane fell, and how fast.
16:07It can't tell you what it took, on the floor of that cockpit, to make it stop.
16:12For that, there's only the captain's own account.
16:16This is the last push, Smit.
16:18Do it.
16:19The door is right there.