At first, it seemed like turbulence. Then like something worse than merely rough air on the flight Wednesday from Dubai to Tel Aviv.
“The plane just started going up and down,” said Meital Zoller, a passenger on the FlyDubai plane. Soon, she said, “we started hearing screams.”
The shouts were coming from near the cockpit, said another passenger, Adam Polovincik. “We tried to be ‘cool’ for our kids,” Mr. Polovincik said in an interview.
Then the bottom dropped out. The plane, a 737, nose-dived at a sickening angle, overhead bins popped open, and luggage flew out. Passengers shrieked and prayed. Many were sure they were about to die.
What is clear so far is that there was a bloody clash in the cockpit miles above the desert of Saudi Arabia, that intervention by passengers and crew members saved the day, and that the roughly 170 people aboard endured minutes of mortal terror.
One of the plane’s pilots had attacked the other and was apparently trying to crash the plane, Israeli officials and passengers said. But the authorities in the United Arab Emirates, where the flight originated, and Saudi Arabia, where the aircraft touched down, have not confirmed that.
The plane plunged so sharply that the passengers, nearly all of them Israeli, felt pinned to their seats.
“You couldn’t move,” one passenger, Hila Gaier told Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, “you were sucked downward.” She turned to her two daughters and partner and told them that she loved them.
Almog Itali, another passenger, told Israel’s Channel 12, “The plane kept stabilizing and then dropping again for several long seconds.”
Flight 1073 dropped more than 17,000 feet in less than two minutes, according to data from Flightradar24. It sent a general emergency signal, then a signal of unlawful interference and then a general emergency signal again. It abruptly reversed course over northern Saudi Arabia, near the Jordanian border.
“In my head, I said: ‘I’m so screwed, I’m so screwed. I don’t deserve to die like this,’” Peleg Itali, a 16-year-old passenger, said in an interview.
Amid the panic, a number of men rushed to the cockpit, where they found one pilot badly injured, and overcame his attacker, the other pilot, who was wielding a knife, witnesses said. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said the injured pilot had been stabbed and had managed to open the cockpit door.
Asaf Rajuan, a passenger on the flight, told reporters that he and four other passengers “acted on instinct,” entering the cockpit and subduing the pilot-turned-attacker. “We neutralized him very quickly,” he said.
“When they opened the cockpit, there was a lot of blood,” another passenger, Miriam Ohayon, told Israel’s I24 News.
Video from the episode shows two bloodied men lying on the floor panels, one shirtless and the other wearing what appears to be a pilot’s uniform. Shota Musayev, a passenger who is trained as a dentist, said he had treated the wounded pilot midair, including for severe wounds to his head and cuts on his fingers.
Mr. Musayev said he and another passenger also tied the attacker’s hands with headphone cables. He said it was not immediately clear if the blood on the attacker’s body was his own or another person’s.
Two pilots sitting just in front of him in the passenger cabin went to the cockpit, took control of the plane and landed it safely, Mr. Rajuan said, and others on board gave similar accounts.
A FlyDubai spokesperson said only that there had been an altercation on the flight deck, and that crew members aboard had secured the aircraft.
“One of our fears was that we didn’t know where we would land,” Mr. Rajuan said. “There was only desert below us.”
The plane landed in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, where passengers disembarked, some of them in bloodstained clothing, and waited for a replacement aircraft sent by FlyDubai to take them on to Tel Aviv. By Wednesday night, all the passengers had arrived safely in Israel.
Israeli officials said on Wednesday that much about the traumatic flight remained unclear, including why a pilot would have tried to crash the plane, and whether it was specifically an attack on Israelis, as many people in Israel — including some in the government — quickly concluded.
Three Israeli security officials said that the co-pilot believed to have carried out the attack was an Omani national. The Omani Foreign Ministry declined to immediately comment.
The FlyDubai spokesperson urged all parties “to refrain from premature speculation while authorities gather the facts.” The airline later said it was suspending all flights to and from Israel pending an investigation into the episode.
Mr. Netanyahu identified the pilot who was stabbed as Capt. Smit Machchhar, an Indian citizen. “Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker — preventing a catastrophic midair disaster,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
The Indian Embassy in Riyadh confirmed the pilot’s identity and said in a statement that he was in a hospital in Tabuk in stable condition.
Miki Zohar, Israel’s minister of culture, thanked the Saudi authorities for their role in helping the Israeli passengers.
“I thank the Saudi people for the warm welcome and kindness they showed the Israeli passengers,” he wrote in a post on X. “God willing, may peace come to us,” he added. Israel and Saudi Arabia don’t maintain diplomatic relations or any open ties.
Gideon Saar, the Israeli foreign minister, said he had spoken with Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, his Emirati counterpart, after the episode. In a statement, Mr. Saar’s office said the two had expressed “mutual determination” to cooperate against “extremist elements that seek to harm security.”
After landing at Ben-Gurion International Airport on Wednesday night, the passengers of Flight 1073 got back to the mundane tasks of airline travel. They stacked their luggage on carts and rolled them into the public area of the terminal. They were greeted by family members — and countless popping flash bulbs and television cameras.
Some began crying as they recounted the ordeal.
Ms. Zoller, who had been traveling with her husband and child, said she felt “so relieved to be back in Israel.”
“Thank God we are OK” she said, her eyes filling with tears.
Reporting was contributed by Isabel Kershner, Vivian Nereim, Adam Rasgon, Max Bearak, Johnatan Reiss, Karla Adam and Ismaeel Naar.
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