Passenger accounts paint a chaotic and terrifying picture of the alleged attempted hijacking of FlyDubai Flight 1073 on Wednesday. The flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv was forced to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said one pilot stabbed his counterpart and tried to crash the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft.
“As they were approaching Israel, one of the pilots stabbed the other pilot, and apparently attempted to crash the plane with everyone on board,” Netanyahu said in a video statement, lauding passengers he said had helped to “neutralize the pilot.”
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz called it “an attempted jihadist terror attack.”
“It was the most frightening experience we’ve ever had in our lives,” passenger Ron Levi told CBS News on Wednesday.
Two U.S. officials told CBS News that four people with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship were aboard the flight.
Here’s what we know about how the suspected terror attack unfolded, based on accounts from Levi and other passengers.
“Worse than a free-fall”
“The flight was going well, we were two hours in,” Levi told CBS News’ Dov Lieber, speaking from Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, where the plane made its safe emergency landing, piloted by an off-duty flight crew member who happened to be on board.
“All of a sudden, what we thought was turbulence started,” said Levi. It kept getting stronger, and “we realized it’s not something regular.”
“I would say much worse than a free-fall,” he said, describing how the plane “started turning all sideways and going up and down in all different kinds of directions, for a pretty long time.”
“It’s very hard to even to estimate if this was 30 seconds or a minute or more than that … it was just the scariest thing possible.”
Levi was sitting in a row of seats with his family, “just holding each other’s hands and saying that we love them and just hoping for the best.”
“And then shouting started from the front of the plane,” he recalled. He saw some people near the front get up.
“Very stressful situation”
Passenger Adam Polo was in row 13, hugging his 6-year-old son while his wife was hugging their 3-year-old daughter. Polo told CBS News he “tried to be cool” for his children and told them, “We will be OK.”
“The first couple of minutes was very terrifying; you just feel like you’re going to crash, but even after the plane was stabilizing, there was more than an hour where we were in the air without the primary crew members,” Polo said.
Polo said he couldn’t see much from his seat, but after 15 minutes, he saw a passenger running out of the cockpit covered in blood.
“No one from the crew members told us what was happening,” Polo said. “The only ones to give us information was the passengers who stood up with an act of bravery.”
Polo, who lives in Israel and was vacationing in Thailand with his family, said everything happened so fast and it was a “very stressful situation.”
“I’m a pretty cynical guy, I’m not getting excited easily, but I think it was one of the most exciting moments of my life when the plane touched the ground,” Polo said.
“The co-pilot tried to murder the pilot”
Levi said he wasn’t close enough to see what happened next, but several other passengers who spoke with Israeli media said one pilot had stabbed the other, details that were also repeated by Netanyahu.
“According to the initial information in our possession, the terrorist’s intention was one thing: to crash the plane with all its passengers,” said Katz, Israel’s defense chief.
Netanyahu said he had spoken with an Israeli passenger who told him that, “somehow, he managed to break into the cockpit together with one of the crew members, and that together they neutralized the pilot who carried out the stabbing while he was attempting to sabotage the aircraft’s systems.”
Passenger Miryam Shira Ohayon said the plane was “pretty much out of control” when the stabbing took place, she believed somewhere over Jordan.
“The co-pilot tried to murder the pilot and basically carry out a suicide attack on the plane,” she told reporters by speakerphone, held up by her mother who was waiting at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv. “It was really on the way to crashing, and it was simply the resourcefulness of many people who took control of the co-pilot and neutralized him.”
Another passenger told The Jerusalem Post that intervening passengers shouted at two off-duty pilots at the back of the plane “to run and take control” of it, and one of them did so after the passengers managed to remove the attacker from the cockpit.
Netanyahu said the person who “managed to stabilize the aircraft” was “another aircrew member who was on the plane.”
“All we heard in the back was shouting,” said Levi. “We saw that some people were dealing with stuff, and it kept on going like that for, I think, about 10, 20 minutes until … the shakiness [of the plane] relaxed.”
“Rumors started coming, and we realized that it wasn’t just turbulence,” he said. “It was something … a lot worse than that.”
“They’re heroes,” he said of the people who intervened to stop the attacking pilot. “We owe them our lives.”
Levi said he saw people covered in blood.
“They’re here with us as well now,” he told CBS News from the airport in Saudi Arabia. “These were the people I’m talking about who … jumped into the cockpit even and saved the situation.”
According to Ohayon, a doctor and others on board helped treat the pilot for unspecified wounds.
“Other than the pilot, there were no injuries, but the bigger fear was really a crash, which is exactly what he was trying to do,” she said.
“I just want to go home”
An Israeli security official told CBS News on Wednesday that Israel is investigating whether it was intended to be a Sept. 11-style terror attack, and whether the attacker was working alone.
The pilot was arrested and taken for questioning by Saudi authorities, Netanyahu said, adding that Israel was working to bring the passengers back to Israel safely.
“There’s another FlyDubai plane here now,” said Levi. “People are a bit reluctant to get on it, naturally. … We want to go home, but we want to do it in a safe way.”
Asked how he was processing the incident, Levi replied: “Honestly, I’m not even starting. We’re all shaking here … I have no idea. I just want to go home.”
The flight landed safely in Tel Aviv around 8 p.m. local time Wednesday. Cheers and chants could be heard as the passengers disembarked.
