'The cockpit was empty': Israeli recounts fight to survive flydubai attempted hijacking - exclusive

The cockpit was empty as the flydubai aircraft descended, Tal said, and the two additional pilots who could take its controls were still in the passenger cabin. While other Israelis fought the attacker at the front of the aircraft, he had to get those pilots forward.

A day later, Tal, an Israeli businessman who lives abroad, sat across from me at the beachfront Carlton hotel in Tel Aviv.

He spoke readily about the passengers who had fought and the dentist who had treated the wounded pilot. He made comparatively little of his own part in getting someone back to the controls.

The view, however, deserved some attention.

With the Tel Aviv skyline visible from where we sat on Thursday, Tal spoke about how extraordinary it felt to see the city from there. The previous day, he and the other passengers had been desperate to land and finally arrive in Israel. Now he could take in the buildings from a hotel by the beach.

His account of an empty cockpit was among the most consequential details to emerge from our second conversation.

During the confrontation aboard the Dubai-to-Tel Aviv flight on Wednesday, he said, there had been an interval when nobody was inside it. He understood that the two pilots traveling among the passengers had to take over.

“I had to shake them to get them to move to the front and take control of the plane, because it was diving,” he had told The Jerusalem Post in our initial exchange.

The aircraft eventually made an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Flydubai confirmed that all passengers were safe and accounted for. Tal’s description of the empty cockpit remains an eyewitness account; the precise sequence inside it and the duration of that interval have not been independently established by the Post

In our correspondence from Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, he had already offered a description of his own contribution.

Others had physically subdued the attacker. He had dealt with the additional pilots and helped find restraints.

He called it “combat support” and added a smiley face.

The two men near row six

Tal had been sitting in row six, immediately behind business class. Two additional flydubai pilots were close by. He said he recognized them when he boarded, although their clothing differed from that of the crew operating the aircraft. A frequent traveler, he had identified them before he had any reason to think he would need their help.

According to the account he sent the Post on Wednesday, one pilot had begun stabbing the other with a small knife and was trying to force the wounded man out of the cockpit. The wounded pilot resisted. Israeli passengers seated toward the front rushed into the confrontation as the aircraft descended.

Tal described several things happening at once. Passengers were trying to overcome the attacker. The injured pilot needed help. The additional pilots had remained in the cabin and, in his description, appeared frozen.

He shouted for them to move forward and take control. He then had to shake them, he said. One ultimately took control of the aircraft; the other took longer to recover from the shock.

The struggle near the cockpit and the effort to get pilots to the controls overlapped. Tal was close enough to see the confrontation while also knowing where the additional pilots were sitting. His account places him between those two groups, trying to get the men with the necessary skills to the place where they were needed.

He was precise in the original correspondence about allocating the credit. Three people had actually subdued the attacker, he wrote. He stood beside them and dealt with other tasks.

Among those tasks was finding something with which to bind the man they were fighting.

“Charging cables,” Tal replied when asked what they had used.

He followed it with a Hebrew expression: “In the desert, every thorn is a flower.”

An Israeli dentist, meanwhile, was treating the wounded pilot. Tal described the injuries as grave and credited the dentist with saving the man’s life. As he reconstructed the emergency, the dentist’s intervention figured alongside the passengers’ struggle and the effort to get the additional pilots forward. Different people had taken responsibility for different parts of a crisis unfolding within a few meters.

What the cabin video showed

At the Carlton, we watched footage from inside the aircraft. It gave our conversation a second reference point alongside his recollections: people visible on a screen, some of whom Tal could identify and whose movements he could explain.

There were flight attendants in checked shirts. A man with blood on his clothing passed through the frame. Tal himself was visible near the front.

“This is me looking at... trying to understand what’s going on,” he said.

I asked about the bloodied man. Tal identified him as one of the Israelis involved in the fight.

The footage showed only part of the cabin. Conversations overlapped and people moved through the shot. Tal’s explanation supplied information the images alone could not: what the passengers were discussing and what he was trying to arrange.

“All the Israelis are aligned that we should have only Israelis in key points,” he said.

“And that’s what we are also discussing. And that’s a point when I’m trying to make sure that you have an Israeli in the cockpit.”

The words described a further stage of the emergency. The passengers who had intervened were trying to determine how the aircraft would remain secure. Tal’s attention had moved from bringing pilots forward to making sure an Israeli passenger was also present in the cockpit.

The additional pilots had the task of flying the aircraft. The Israeli presence Tal described concerned security: passengers who had just intervened in a violent confrontation wanted someone they trusted to remain at critical positions.

In Wednesday’s messages, he had described taking that effort further. The Israelis told the cabin crew that they were now running the flight, he wrote, and positioned Israelis to watch crew members. His account conveyed the distrust and uncertainty among the passengers; it did not establish that other crew members had participated in the attack.

The new interview helped explain the scene visible in the footage. Tal was trying to work out who was where while discussing which positions the Israelis should occupy. The people moving through the cabin were still responding to an emergency, even as the physical struggle gave way to the work of securing the aircraft.

The phrase he used, “key points,” was characteristic of the conversation. He could describe an extraordinary situation in the language of an assignment that needed to be carried out.

The things he could remember

Tal’s account was detailed about some moments and much less certain about others. He could describe where he had been sitting, the men he had urged forward and the search for charging cables. He could not reliably say how much time had passed.

Asked about the duration of the descent and struggle in a separate television exchange, he said: “Frankly speaking, I can only quote on this one what other people say. I don’t have any sense of the time.”

He described himself as being “in acting mode,” occupied with doing things.

That was consistent with what he had written from Saudi Arabia before we met. Throughout the incident, he said, he had felt detached and continued carrying out tasks. He had yet to absorb what had happened and thought it would catch up with him after he landed in Israel.

His first instinct on making contact with the Post had been to correct what he believed were errors in the reporting. He asked to see the facts we had so he could identify what needed changing. We continued by WhatsApp because he felt uncomfortable talking with soldiers around him.

The exchange developed over several hours. His description became more specific as the questions moved from the general sequence to individual actions: how the cockpit had become accessible, who had fought, how the attacker had been restrained and what Tal himself had done.

He also distinguished between his understanding of the attack and a specific claim about what had been shouted during it.

Asked whether he had heard “Allahu akbar,” Tal said he had been standing close to the cockpit and had heard no such shout. Neither had the people beside him, he wrote.

“None of us heard it.”

He described the attacker as a terrorist throughout our correspondence. His certainty about that did not lead him to endorse a detail he could not confirm. His account rested on the repeated stabbing, the effort to force the other pilot out and what he had witnessed as the aircraft descended.

A daughter screaming for her father

There was one moment Tal said had interrupted his concentration on the tasks in front of him.

The flight carried children returning from vacations with their families. During the confrontation, he recalled, they had screamed that they did not want to die. One girl’s father was among the passengers fighting the attacker. She was screaming that she did not want him to die.

“That was the only moment when I stopped and thought about my own children,” Tal wrote.

He had been traveling alone. His children were abroad, and when we corresponded on Wednesday, he said they did not know what had happened. They did not speak Hebrew and did not have mobile phones.

In Saudi Arabia, he described doctors attending to children and passengers in distress. Food had been provided. He found the Saudis kind and understanding.

A senior Saudi figure, he said, approached the Israeli dentist and thanked him for saving the pilot. The man then took the dentist’s hand and walked with him. Tal explained the gesture as an expression of warmth.

These details had arrived in separate messages during an afternoon in which he was still waiting to reach Israel. We discussed the wounded pilot, the frightened children and the prospect of another flight. At 3:17 p.m., Tal wrote that they were boarding the plane back.

By Thursday, he was in Tel Aviv, looking out at the city he had wanted so badly to reach. Sitting opposite him, the understated description he had sent from Saudi Arabia seemed entirely consistent with the man: the people who fought deserved the credit, and he had carried out the work alongside them.

Even when our messages turned to his own family, he was reluctant to claim too much. I had congratulated him on his children’s lack of mobile phones. He attributed that largely to his wife.