‘He’s stabbing the pilot!’: Woman who alerted crew to flydubai attack recounts harrowing moments

Tali Manes, the woman who alerted the crew on flydubai Flight 1073 to the attack taking place in the cockpit, recounts the experience in an interview on Channel 12.

Manes recalls that she was taking her young daughter to the bathroom on the flight when she heard strange noises coming from the cockpit. When she began to hear someone knocking on the cockpit door from the inside, which “sounded very, very unusual to me,” she alerted a flight attendant sitting nearby, she says.

“Something is happening in there,” she recalls telling the crew member. After she felt that the flight attendant wasn’t reacting, she says, “I screamed at him and touched his hand forcefully. I said, “Something is happening in there!’ He simply went to the door and opened it.”

Once the door was open, Manes says, she saw “blood all over the cockpit and very, very sharp fighting moves… I saw it all with my own eyes, and I began to scream.”

She continues, “I screamed, ‘He’s stabbing the pilot, he’s stabbing the pilot, come help!’ with screams of fear… People looked at me and didn’t understand. My voice is still a little hoarse.”

Manes says the thwarting of the attack, which saved the lives of the 180 people aboard the flight, was a “great miracle.”