#Socialites, come get into this: A Flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday after one of its pilots was reportedly stabbed in the cockpit, prompting a brief hijacking scare.
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Flight FZ1073 departed Dubai at 6:05 a.m. and landed at Tabuk airport in northwestern Saudi Arabia after a sharp loss of altitude and two emergency transponder signals. Passengers say a group of travelers subdued the attacker and pulled him from the cockpit. The airline says everyone on board is safe, and Israeli security services are investigating.
The flight was supposed to be routine, about three hours and fifteen minutes from Dubai to Tel Aviv. Instead, flight trackers showed the jet making a U-turn over the Jordan-Saudi border, then dropping like a rock. The plane lost more than 14,000 feet, and other outlets are reporting drops as steep as 17,000 to 18,000 feet in just a couple of minutes. It then broadcast a 7700 squawk, the code for a general emergency, and about seven minutes later the signal switched to 7500, the code for a hijacking.
Back on the ground, Israel wasn’t playing. An unnamed official told CBS News that Israel scrambled warplanes over fears of a hijacking, on a plane believed to be carrying dozens of Israeli citizens. US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said everyone in the region was on high alert that morning.
Inside the cabin, it was pure chaos. Videos flooding social media show blood, panic, and passengers in survival mode. Passengers described a man with a knife stabbing one of the pilots, and a group of them jumping in to pull the attacker out of the cockpit. One passenger, Ariel Oseran, filmed a message with blood smeared across his forehead as the plane came down toward an unfamiliar place. “We need help,” he said.
Another woman told Israeli TV that her husband helped “neutralize the terrorist,” who she claimed tried to crash the plane. The mother of another passenger got a phone call from her daughter in the middle of it all, and said her daughter described passengers running toward a guy holding a knife. One bloodied passenger summed up the fear on camera: “We thought we wouldn’t make it out alive.”
Israeli sources suspect the co-pilot stabbed the captain before trying to hijack the plane, and two Israeli officials told CNN one of the pilots was Omani. But that’s still coming from sources and passenger accounts, not an official finding.
The Tabuk airport statement said only that the captain and co-pilot were injured and taken to the hospital, and it didn’t say what caused the injuries. So watch out for the hot takes flying around timelines right now, because nobody has the full story yet.
Either way, the plane made it down in one piece. Flydubai said it “landed safely after an incident during the journey,” and confirmed that everyone on board was safe and accounted for. Video shows passengers celebrating once the wheels touched the ground.
We’ll keep you posted as the investigation moves.