Passengers on board the Boeing Co. 737 Max aircraft were settling into their final hour of flight time from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday morning when chaos suddenly erupted over the skies of Saudi Arabia.
Inside the cockpit, one of the pilots had attacked his colleague, stabbing him repeatedly with a sharp object, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later said.
The aircraft, too, revealed signs of damage. Among the people in the main cabin, Natan Grempel was seated toward the middle near the wing, returning home to Israel via Dubai from a trip to Japan with members of his family. When his wife and daughter got up to use the bathroom, they noticed the door of the cockpit was slightly ajar. The aircraft later made an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, where the attacker, whose identity has not been disclosed, is being questioned by local authorities. Netanyahu branded the event a serious security incident, crediting the resolve of the passengers and crew that rushed to the front of the plane for saving many lives. Photos of the aircraft after it landed in Saudi Arabia showed the rudder on the vertical stabilizer missing – damage that can occur when flight surfaces are moved too aggressively at high speeds. But that split-second moment when a group of people decided to take charge of the plane also turned what most certainly would have meant death and destruction into a lucky escape for the people on board.
“They saw there was no one at the wheel, no pilot, and they started to scream,” he said after they returned to Tel Aviv on a repatriation flight in the evening, escorted by police and cheered on by people on the ground.
