Flydubai passenger recounts terrifying dive as analyst warns against learning 'the wrong lesson'

Uri Pintov, who was aboard flight 1073 with his wife and three children, told the Post that passengers were certain they would die.

An Israeli father who was aboard flydubai Flight 1073 when the co-pilot allegedly attacked the captain told The Jerusalem Post that passengers were convinced they were about to die as the aircraft plunged, and then spent roughly 90 minutes not knowing where they were being flown.

In this week's Deep Dive episode, Uri Pintov, who was returning from a family vacation in Thailand with his wife and three children, said to the Post Editor-in-Chief, Zvika Klein, that he was walking back from the rear of the plane when it went into a steep, banking dive that pinned him to the floor for more than a minute. "We all realized we were going to die," he said.

Pintov described how passengers bound the attacker with airline headphones, carried oxygen and water to the badly wounded Indian captain, and assigned Israelis to escort every cabin crew member because "we can't trust anybody." With the cockpit locked and almost no communication from the relief pilots, passengers feared they were being taken to Yemen or Iran, he said. Only when a crew member recognized the airport at Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, did they begin to believe they would survive.

The Israeli passenger praised the Saudi security forces who received the passengers, saying they were "very gentle with kids and women." He said a tense two hours followed after it became clear Israeli aircraft would not be allowed to land, leaving families to decide whether to board a replacement flydubai plane.

He said that apart from psychological support from the community, there had been no formal outreach from Israeli officials. He called on Israel and the airline to issue an official statement confirming the incident as an attempted terrorist hijacking, to counter claims circulating online that it was staged.

Also a guest, Seth J. Frantzman, the Post's senior Middle East analyst and correspondent, added that several of the so-called miracles were in fact protocol, including the off-duty pilots on board. He noted that because the aircraft and its flight recorders survived, investigators should be able to reconstruct events in detail. He cautioned against overreacting the way aviation security did after the shoe bomber, and said flydubai is "one of the crown jewels of the Abraham Accords."

A permanent withdrawal of the airline would push up Israeli airfares, which are already inflated by a shortage of capacity, he said. Frantzman described Riyadh's refusal to admit Israeli planes as an understandable matter of national pride but a missed opportunity. He also argued that Saudi normalization is unlikely while the current government pursues its stated policies on Gaza and the Palestinian Authority.