A captain who was attacked by a flydubai co-pilot who attempted to crash a passenger plane bound for Israel confessed on the 2nd (local time) that even when his life was threatened, he barely survived the situation while thinking of his passengers.
According to the Associated Press, Captain Smit Machar, an Indian national who operated the flight between Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Tel Aviv, Israel, where the accident occurred on the 30th of last month, had a video call with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and told him about the tense situation at the time of the accident.
Captain Machar recalled in his phone call with Prime Minister Modi, "I fell to the ground with many injuries."
He said, "I was fighting for my life and at some point I realized that if I didn't get up, the passengers might lose their lives."
Captain Machar was seriously injured when the Omani co-pilot swung a weapon at him, but he unlocked the cockpit door and allowed three Israeli passengers and crew to enter the cockpit and subdue the co-pilot.
Captain Machar was transferred from Saudi Arabia, where the plane made an emergency landing, to a hospital in the UAE the day before and is recovering at a hospital in Abu Dhabi.
It was revealed that the first officer who attacked Captain Machar had previously been banned from flying in Oman due to concerns about his radical ideology.
Citing sources, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on the same day that, despite this disposition, he was later hired by Fly Dubai, an airline in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and was also deployed on the UAE-Israel route, which has high security sensitivity due to the situation in the Middle East and threats of terrorism.
However, it has not been confirmed whether the Omani authorities shared concerns about the radicalization of the first officer with other countries or airlines at the time.
Also, it is not known what specific radical ideas he was into.
Currently, the UAE is leading the investigation into this case.
This is because under international aviation law, jurisdiction over crimes that occur on board an aircraft is given priority to the country in which the aircraft is registered.
A UAE government spokesman said he would not comment on the first officer's history of being banned from flying in Oman "to avoid predicting the outcome or influencing the investigation."
However, Anwar Gargash, diplomatic advisor to the UAE president, highly praised the captain's contribution to preventing the worst-case scenario of a plane crash through
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also defined this attempted plane crash as terrorism.
Prime Minister Netanyahu claimed, “The attacker had gone through a process of Islamic radicalization,” and “He tried to crash the plane with passengers on board.”
While the investigation into this incident is ongoing, flydubai has temporarily suspended all flights to Israel, a popular route, leaving hundreds of passengers traveling between the two countries stranded. There were about 180 people on the plane that crashed, many of them Israelis.
An Israeli official said that a special return flight was launched from today to bring home Israeli passengers stranded in the UAE due to the suspension of flights between the two countries.
This incident is expected to be a test for the UAE government, which has built a reputation for effectively responding to extremist activities.
Aviation security experts are already evaluating this incident as a major security failure, pointing out that not only did the weapon pass the security screening, but anyone with the intention of crashing the aircraft should have been screened out through identity verification before arriving at the airport.
John Alterman, director of global security and geopolitics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a U.S. think tank, told the Associated Press, "The UAE wants to be perceived as a very safe place, not a place with serious weaknesses," and added, "The UAE will be concerned about protecting its reputation."
