The crew of the hijacked flydubai plane shockingly clashed with heroic Israeli passengers who subdued the ax-wielding co-pilot after he attacked the pilot — demanding he be freed, two men who helped secure the terror suspect told The Post in exclusive interviews.
“They were asking us to untie the terrorist — we had no idea why,” said banking executive Tzvika Manes, one of the three civilians who took down the would-be hijacker.
“They were saying to free the terrorist — we got instantly suspicious of them,” said real estate professional Daniel Schlichter, who was sitting in the second row, close to the cockpit .
Manes, 40, was traveling with his wife and three daughters aged 11, 7, and 6, after a family vacation in Japan, when the co-pilot, identified by The Wall Street Journal as an Omani national Hamam al-Hammami, began hacking at the Indian pilot, Capt. Smit Machchhar, with a crash ax.
The seriously injured Machchhar managed to open the cockpit door. Manes, along with plumber Yaniv Hayoun and Asaf Rajuan, rushed to confront the attacker and overpowered him.
Hayoun, a plumber, then managed to stabilize the nosediving plane using techniques he learned from the TV show “Air Disasters.”
But after the three Israelis subdued the pilot and restrained him face-down with his hands tied behind his back — first with zip ties, then using headphone wires that Schlicter gathered from passengers.
As he was subdued, Hayoun heard the terrorist cry, “Kill me, kill me” — apparently because he failed in his Jihadist mission, Manes said.
Yet some crew members began demanding that he be freed.
An argument ensued and the Israeli trio shot back that under no circumstances would the suspected terrorist be released.
“They said, ‘You are not God, you are not going to kill him,’” Manes recalled. “We didn’t want to kill him, we just wanted him not to kill us.”
Schlichter, 59, who was also returning from a vacation in Japan with his wife, and Manes both said that the Israelis even gave the wounded terrorist an oxygen mask.
“We wanted him to live so he could be investigated,” Schlichter said.
A power play ensued with the crewmembers insisting that they were in charge of the plane and needed to remain alone in the area directly in front of the cockpit.
The Israelis, fearing the crew could be involved in the pilot’s plot, ordered the stewards to leave the cockpit area and to take seats in the middle of the plane.
“We told them, “Now the policy is we’re in charge and you do what we say,’ ” Manes said.
“We didn’t know what to think, we were in a suspicious mode for every steward.”
A group of passengers, Schlichter among them, escorted the crew members to seats in the fifth or sixth row, away from the cockpit.
“We shouted at them and told them to sit down,” said Schlichter, who has two children and two granddaughters.
The trio then enlisted a “big guy” to guard the cockpit and prevent anyone from entering, Manes said.
Reserve pilots seated on the back of the plane had at that point already entered the cockpit and taken over the control of the aircraft.
After the crew was seated, they began to “understand that this was a special case,” Schlichter said, and they started tending to the traumatized passengers, providing them with blankets and water.
The crew has not been accused of conspiring with the bloodthirsty co-pilot.
When asked by The Post about the crew’s behavior, flydubai said it could not comment on a matter under investigation. “We remain fully committed to supporting the ongoing investigation and are in close coordination with the relevant government authorities and regulators,” it said in a statement.
“I stayed with the terrorist until we landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. After that I hugged my daughters and told them they were going to be OK, and that they are heroes,” Manes said.
Once the plane landed, the adrenaline began to wear off and passengers started processing what they had just survived.
Some had panic attacks while others broke down crying, Manes said.
“They didn’t want to fly back to Israel on another flydubai flight. Many wouldn’t step foot on the plane until they were personally told by the Mossad that the pilots had been cleared,” he said.
The self-described “regular finance guy” never dreamed he would one day be the center of a movie-like life-or-death midair battle.
His only thought was saving his family.
“When I heard my daughters crying ‘Father I don’t want to die’ — that was the trigger for me to run and fight, I wasn’t thinking of anything, it was just fight or flight,” Manes said.
The pilot fought the three men viciously.
“Punches were flying, we were kicking him, we didn’t know if he still had his knife, we couldn’t see it,” Manes said. “None of us were fighters or heroes, we were just normal guys who wanted to save our families.”
“It was sounds you only hear in a movie,” Schlichter said.
Manes, the CEO of Barak Capital Underwriting, Israel’s largest investment bank, said he has bruises all over his body.
“The G-Force was like something I never felt like in my life, it felt like everything was soaking, it was a crazy feeling,” he said.
Schlichter said that he was fully prepared to die as the plane nosedived 17,000 feet in moments.
“It was the longest minute I’ll ever have in my life, I remember everything, I remember clearly thinking about 9/11, then I thought about my children, my family, how awful it would be for them to hear what happened,” he said.
Both men said they were overwhelmed by the number of things that had to go right for everyone aboard to survive.
“Statistically this kind of miracle can not be happening, the chance that each one of us, especially would be on the same second where they had to be, I can’t even fathom how unlikely it is,” Schlichter said.
“I believe that definitely we had divine protection,” Manes said. “Someone up there is watching over us.”
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