Smit Machchhar, the Indian pilot stabbed on Wednesday by his companion on a Flydubai flight between Dubai and Tel Aviv, told his country's Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, this Friday how he used his last strength to open the cabin door and be able to receive help while the plane fell sharply. "I knew the plane was falling... I was on the ground. I told myself that the door was there, that I just had to open it. I managed to do it and people came in," he said.
The device, with 174 people on board, descended almost 4,300 meters in less than 30 seconds in an alleged attempt by the Omani co-pilot to crash it, until – thanks to the door opened by Machchhar – passengers and crew managed to subdue the aggressor. A reserve pilot then corrected course and made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, with the Indian commander losing pulse and blood.
He is the great “hero” who saved the lives of 174 people on Wednesday, as both Modi and the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, defined him from the first moment, based on the story of the passengers who ran to the cabin. Machchhar spoke publicly for the first time about the incident this Friday, in a video call with Modi from a hospital bed in Abu Dhabi, where he was transferred the day before from Saudi Arabia.
In the video – almost 10 minutes long and released by the Indian prime minister on his social networks – he appears with a nasal cannula to receive oxygen and with his head and hands bandaged, due to the stab wounds he received, according to Israeli witnesses. On several occasions he wipes away tears while narrating what happened. He even apologizes to Modi for this: “I'm sorry to cry in front of you, sir.”
In the conversation, the commander explains that the other pilot continued attacking him, already on the floor of the cockpit, when he realized that the plane was losing altitude. “I was lying on the floor, injured, but I told myself that I had to make one last effort to open the door from the inside,” he said. "Others intervened and also played a role. Of course, I was fighting for my own life, but at the same time I knew that I was not going to allow others to die," he adds.
Machchhar has been flying for 17 years, 11 of them as a captain, a time that, he says, has given him the ability to know what is happening to a plane even with his eyes closed. He was born in Modi's home state of Gujarat, grew up in Mumbai (where his parents live) and lives in Dubai, now working for Flydubai. The pilot assures that he feels that God saved him from dying in that cockpit. During the attack, he said, he said a prayer to the Hindu deity Hanuman.
This is how the Israeli doctor who treated him, Shota Musaieb, recalled it, received on Thursday as another “hero” by Netanyahu. "[Machchhar] spent the entire flight [until the emergency landing in Saudi Arabia] praying. I really feared that we would lose him, because sometimes he lost consciousness and his pulse was very low. That's why we landed in Saudi Arabia," said this doctor on Wednesday, as soon as we landed in Tel Aviv. "He had lost a lot of blood. He had stab wounds on his face. And on his hand, to the point that a little more and it was cut in two," added the Israeli passenger, explaining that the pilot told them that he was 39 years old and had two children.
Courage and speed
Modi has praised his bravery, patience and quick decision-making and has claimed that his mettle saved lives and also the reputation of Indian pilots.
Machchhar joined SpiceJet, an Indian airline, in 2011. When he joined Flydubai in 2022, he was already an experienced pilot. According to his LinkedIn profile, he has almost 10,000 hours of flight experience, more than 6,400 hours of them as pilot in command. SpiceJet issued a statement to underline that it saved “countless lives” by preventing a tragedy whose reasons are still unknown.
Israel treats it as a clear attempted jihadist attack. Netanyahu assured this Friday that the progress of the investigation "is clarifying the picture" in the direction that the Omani pilot - whose name remains not made public - "had gone through a process of Islamist radicalization" and intended to "crash the plane with its passengers." "We are investigating whether it was sent by someone. Whoever did it will pay a very high price," he said a day after suggesting, without evidence, that Iran could be behind it.
