Thirty-four thousand feet above the Saudi desert on the morning of September 30, 2026, Flydubai Flight 1073 was cruising toward Tel Aviv. The Boeing 737 MAX 8, on a routine departure from Dubai, carried 174 passengers, 27 of them children.
Captain Smit Machchhar, 38, sat in the left seat with more than 9,750 hours of flight time behind him. He had spent 17 years in commercial aviation, including 11 years at SpiceJet in India, before joining Flydubai as a direct entry captain in 2022.
Two hours and fifteen minutes into the flight, cruising at 34,000 feet near the Saudi-Jordanian border, the co-pilot rose from the right seat and appeared to begin praying. Machchhar did not turn around.
Four or five minutes later, the co-pilot struck him from behind with the cockpit crash axe. Machchhar said later that his first thought was that the aircraft had suffered catastrophic damage.
He fell to the cockpit floor, bleeding heavily. The co-pilot seized the controls and pushed the aircraft into a steep dive, dropping it more than 14,000 feet in under a minute, the speed climbing past an estimated 600 miles per hour and exceeding the airframe's structural limits.
The aerodynamic forces at that speed tore away most of the rudder, the vertical control surface at the tail that steers the aircraft's heading. The aircraft was diving with part of its tail structure gone and the cockpit sealed.
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Cockpit doors on commercial aircraft lock during flight. They can be opened from the inside, by the crew at the controls, or from the outside using an emergency keypad code.
Machchhar was lying on the cockpit floor with a depressed skull fracture and blurred vision, the blows still coming. He was the only person on the aircraft who could reach that lock.
He said afterward that even from the floor he could sense the aircraft diving. He had been flying for 17 years, he said, and could tell what was happening to the plane with his eyes closed.
"I told myself to go for one last push to open the door from inside," he said. He opened it while the blows were still landing on him.
Passengers and crew rushed through the open door, overpowered the co-pilot, and pulled him from the controls. Two off-duty Flydubai pilots who had been traveling as passengers reached the flight deck, took the controls, and leveled the aircraft at roughly 15,000 feet.
They landed the damaged Boeing 737 at Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, roughly 85 minutes after the aircraft had been forced from its cruising altitude, the rudder still largely missing. All passengers and crew survived.
Machchhar underwent emergency cranial reconstruction surgery at a hospital in Saudi Arabia. He was later airlifted to Abu Dhabi for further treatment.
A dentist among the passengers who had treated Machchhar's wounds on the cabin floor while the off-duty pilots flew the aircraft told reporters afterward, "I was afraid we would really lose him."
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