Photos of flydubai plane after landing show tail has broken rudder

By Emanuel Fabian

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30 September 2026, 1:18 pm

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Emanuel (Mannie) Fabian is The Times of Israel's military correspondent

Passengers disembark from a flydubai Boeing 737 MAX from Dubai to Tel Aviv which landed at Tabuk Airport in Saudi Arabia, September 30, 2026. The rudder shows damage. The flight suffered an emergency mid-air, with the copilot subdued after stabbing the captain in an alleged attempt to crash the plane full of Israelis, September 30, 2026 (Social media: used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)

The flydubai flight that landed at Tabuk Airport in Saudi Arabia appears to have sustained damage to the rudder on the rear of the aircraft, images show.

The images show that a section of the rudder is missing from the vertical stabilizer.

The images also show passengers, many of them Israeli, disembarking the aircraft.

The Boeing 737 MAX had taken a sharp nosedive, dropping from 34,000 to around 17,000 feet in under a minute, during the incident.

Arik Zer, a former Shin Bet head of flight security, says the rapid plunge of the plane likely caused the damage, telling Channel 12 news that this would not have been caused by any outside object impacting the plane.