Flydubai Flight 1073 Miracle: Six Moments That Saved 174 Lives on Sukkot

Takeaways

• 174 lives came home.
• A stabbed captain managed to open the locked door.
• 5 Israeli passengers were brave enough to rush the cockpit and neutralize the attacker.
• Two off-duty pilots just happened to be in the cabin.
• Netanyahu called it a miracle from Heaven.

A Flight Headed Straight Into Disaster

Flydubai Flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv on September 30, 2026, in the middle of Sukkot. The plane fell more than 14,000 feet in under 30 seconds, according to Flightradar24 data cited by NPR.

Israeli officials call it an attempted jihadist terror attack. Benjamin Netanyahu said the co-pilot stabbed the captain and apparently tried to crash the jet with everyone aboard, and an Omani official confirmed the accused was born in Oman. The echo of September 11 is impossible to miss.

Passengers described screams, a knife (or an axe), and a pilot forced to the floor. Picture it: a locked cockpit, a bloodied pilot and a jet in freefall over the Saudi desert.

Sukkot is the week we sit in fragile huts and remember that God’s shelter is the only roof that holds. That morning, 174 people found out exactly what that means.

The Captain Who Refused to Die

Miracle #1: Captain Smit Machchhar, an Indian national based in Dubai, was stabbed in his own cockpit by his jihadi co-pilot. 

Yet he fought back and somehow managed to open the cockpit door, allowing passengers to storm in. Since September 11, cockpit doors stay locked and open from the inside, so a stabbed man had to reach that release himself. The Israeli dentist who treated him said “a few more moments, we would have lost him.” The obvious truth is, a few more moments, and we would have lost the plane and every soul on the plane.

Ordinary Passengers, Extraordinary Courage

Miracle #2: Dan Zoler told NPR he watched three brave passengers (who happened to be seated in the front of the plane) hurl themselves onto the co-pilot and pin him down. Yaniv Hayoun says he called more Israelis to join him, then locked the attacker in a chokehold and dragged him out of the cockpit. Hayoun, Zvika Manes, and Asaf Rajuan, managed to subdue the co-pilot by hog-tying him with the plane’s media headphones. 

Miracle #3:  As the plane was nose-diving down, Hayoun, an Israeli plumber (with no aviation training at all), grabbed the controls of the plane and pulled back, levelling off the plane.  Asked how he knew what to do, he credited the docuseries Air Crash Investigation (Mayday) and said he knew to push the controls up from having watched the TV series.

Miracle #4: Reports also say two off-duty pilots just happened to be sitting in the cabin. Flydubai says crew traveling aboard secured and landed the aircraft in Saudi Arabia. Few flights carry spare pilots, and this one had them on exactly the right morning.

Plane Stayed Flyable Despite Damaged Rutter 

Miracle #5: The plane would not fall from the sky. Flight FZ1073 plunged from about 34,000 feet to roughly 17,000 feet in under a minute, according to Times of Israel. Netanyahu said the plane “went into a spin” as it dove, and a passenger described a steep, nose-down dive with an intense spin.

Then came the damage. A senior Flydubai official told The National the rudder was damaged, and photos from Tabuk show part of it missing from the tail. A former Shin Bet aviation security chief said the plunge likely tore it away.

Yet the jet stayed flyable. It kept flying for roughly an hour to an hour and a half at about 15,000 feet, according to ABC, until it touched down in Tabuk. A plane missing part of its tail obeyed its pilots all the way to the runway. 

Why the Distress Calls Were a Miracle

Miracle #6:  Squawk code 7700 tells every controller in range that a plane is in trouble. Code 7500 says something far worse: a crime is happening on board. It is designed to alert the ground silently, so an attacker never knows. Miraculously, someone aboard FZ1073 got those codes out in the middle of a violent knife fight. Tabuk controllers knew exactly what they were dealing with, cleared the landing, and Saudi authorities arrested the co-pilot on the ground.

Incidentally, Saudi Arabia has no formal diplomatic relations with Israel, and no airline runs scheduled flights between them. Yet on September 30, 2026, a plane full of Israelis lifted off from Saudi soil and landed at Ben Gurion Airport.

Israel’s Mossad and Shin Bet approved the rescue flight’s crew, and Tabuk airport confirmed that every passenger from FZ1073 had boarded. A cockpit terrorist attack pushed a Dubai jet into Saudi Arabia, and that emergency opened a route home that no scheduled flight flies. Wow!

The Short List of Today’s Miracles

1. A stabbed captain managed to unlock the cockpit door.
2. Brave passengers reached the cockpit in time to neutralize the co-pilot and save the life of the pilot.
3. One passenger adjusted the cockpit controls and levelled the plane from its nosedive based on what he had learned from watching a TV show.  
4. Two off-duty pilots were sitting in the cabin and were able to take control of the plane.
5. The plane stabilized after a 14,000-foot drop and damage to the rutter.
6. In the midst of a violent knife-fight, someone typed the emergency codes, which set off a high alert on ground. 

A Song Called “Even Better”

At touchdown in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met a group of passengers and sang Od Yoter Tov (Even Better). It is the refrain of the song “Tamid Ohev Oti” (“He Always Loves Me”) by Rabbi Shalom Arush and Yair Elitzur, built on a Breslov mantra: God always loves me, and only good is coming.

Israelis have sung it during missile alerts, and it has become an anthem even among non-religious Jews. On a morning when a jet nearly became a weapon, hearing 174 survivors and a prime minister sing Even Better rattles the soul.

Without Every Single One

Remove any link and we would be searching a desert for wreckage and attending 174 funerals. Netanyahu called it a miracle from Heaven.

The investigation continues, but the outcome is clear: a flight that plunged toward catastrophe ended with its passengers alive and their families waiting with open arms.