'It was like lions in a killing mode': Hero flydubai passengers recount fight to survive

Heroic passengers who helped save flydubai Flight 1073 have spoken of their ordeal to CBS.

Daniel Schlichter says the 30-to-40 seconds in which the plane was diving sharply were “probably the longest minute of my life.”

“The first thing that [came] up is actually 9/11. And I said, ‘How can it be? How can we end this life like that?’ You see all your life and you think about what is important. And just holding my wife’s hand and saying, ‘If we have to go, we have to go.'”

The men spoke of the animalistic urge to survive that took over when faced with the possibility of death, and their fight with the terrorist copilot who had stabbed the captain and was trying to bring down the aircraft.

“I saw my daughter and my wife, and I understand that I must run. I turn, switch to an animal switch, and I feel really like an animal… I decided that we are going to survive, try to survive, to save my family,” Manes says.

This past Wednesday, the co-pilot of Fly Dubai's Flight 1073, flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv, attacked the captain and tried to crash the Boeing 737 Max, the jet plunging 14,000 feet in a matter of seconds.

Passengers subdued the attacker and another pilot righted the plane with… pic.twitter.com/pcEMvLNkDe

— CBS Sunday Morning ???? (@CBSSunday) October 4, 2026

Tal Samuel adds: “Everyone here, on the day-to-day, are super decent and polite people. But when you watch the situation, you didn’t see a finance person, and you didn’t see an insurance guy. It was something different. It was like lions that are in a killing mode.”

Manes remembers fighting with the terrorist copilot. “I was jumping on him, punching,” he says. “He tried to resist, and we didn’t know if he had a knife.”

At the same time, Captain Smit Machchhar was very badly wounded, having been repeatedly stabbed by the copilot before managing to open the cockpit door for the passengers to rush in.

“And we are shouting, if there is a doctor on the plane,” Manes says.

Dentist Shota Musaev tells CBS he told his wife: “‘I need to go,’ and, ‘I love you.’ That’s it.”

Examining Machchhar, he thought he was in mortal danger.

“I think we have not more time,” he tells the network. “I check everything, of course, I said to the steward, ‘We have no time – land the plane,'” he recalls.

Musaev says he believes the passengers and crew are now “a very big family.”

“If [the captain] hadn’t been smart and heroic, we would not be alive. On the other hand, if we had not been heroes, he would not be alive.”