Captain of flydubai plane describes blocking axe blows as co-pilot attacked

The captain of the flydubai flight to Israel last month, who was attacked by a co-pilot who intended to crash the plane in a terror attack, describes blocking axe blows to the head and screaming for help as he reached for a knob to open the cockpit door.

Captain Smit Machchhar has been hailed as a hero for his role in averting disaster on the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv last month, helping to thwart the attack by the Omani co-pilot who reportedly intended to crash the plane into Ben Gurion Airport. Israeli passengers subdued the attacker and helped steady the plane.

Speaking in an interview with The National newspaper from a hospital bed in Abu Dhabi, his head and left arm bandaged, Machchhar says that when the first blow landed, he thought something had gone “horribly wrong [with] the aircraft structure,” before quickly realizing he was being attacked and things had “taken a drastic turn.”

“The next thought was I need to get help in here,” he said in the interview, published yesterday.

“My immediate action was to free myself from the seat belts and I tried to just block the blows as much as I could,” he says, pointing to his arm that was wounded as he defended himself. “The blows were coming on the head.”

“Immediately, my hand went to the knob that opens the door and screaming for my colleagues, screaming his name,” he says. “I believe that was the first time when I lost my consciousness.”

The aircraft was in Saudi airspace when the co-pilot attacked Machchhar with a crash axe, typically kept in the cockpit for emergency use.

Machchhar says he heard the cockpit door opening and screaming “between my colleague and the guy.”

He says the scariest thing he felt was the aircraft nose “steeply going down.”

“I was not very sure that I’ll make it out alive from this,” he says. “Did I give up? No.”