International leaders have rushed to praise Smit Machchhar, the captain of flight FZ 1073. Bleeding heavily from multiple stab wounds, he somehow managed to release his cockpit door, allowing passengers and crew to gain entry and overpower his co-pilot turned assailant, an Omani national, who had attacked Machchhar in an apparent attempt to crash the plane. Other crew members were able to stabilise the flight and, just before 11am local time on Wednesday, the Boeing 737 Max made a safe emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. All 174 passengers on board escaped serious injury.
Yesterday, as internationally coordinated investigations continued, the attacker’s motives remained unknown. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News it was “too early to say” if there was any Iranian involvement, while claiming the co-pilot had previously undergone radical Islamist indoctrination and was suicidal. Other senior Israeli figures have been more vehement, with ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, describing the incident as a “terror attack”. Two Israeli security sources later told Reuters that they had not yet found Iranian involvement.
Saudi investigators detained the co-pilot upon landing and are cooperating with the United Arab Emirates, the US, Oman and Israel to determine his reasons and potential affiliations. William Christou, a Beirut-based reporter with the Guardian, tells me: “They’re examining whether it’s a terror attack, whether it had any previous planning or prior direction, and if it could be a lone wolf attacker, who was perhaps motivated by anti-Israel hate, but wasn’t necessarily linked to any larger organisation or state.”
‘The story changed moment to moment’
William began drafting his initial report as soon as he woke up to news alerts about a potential hijacking. The Israeli government originally minimised the incident, describing it as a fight between pilots, while another early report suggested the plane had to land because of a fight between Ukrainian and Russian co-pilots.
“I was sifting through so much misinformation,” he says. “The story changed very quickly, and moment to moment.”
Back in the UK, Oliver Holmes was looking at flight trackers. Now based at Guardian HQ, Oliver has reported extensively across the Middle East. What I didn’t know until we spoke is that he once trained as a pilot, which has left him with an enduring interest in aerospace and aviation.
Flight tracking websites have transformed how we report in-air incidents, he tells me. “Before any government has made an announcement, these platforms can tell you something seriously wrong has happened.”
Flight tracking website Flightradar24 recorded the aircraft rapidly descending from its cruising altitude of about 34,000ft to 17,000ft in less than two minutes, just as it reached to the Saudi-Jordanian border. Oliver suggests that investigators will look at whether this sudden and ferocious plunge was why the plane eventually landed with part of its tail missing.
Oliver sent what he could interpret from the tracking data to his international desk editors, who asked him to work on a tick-tock piece – not, for once, a reference to social media, but an old-school print term for an article that sets out the hour-by-hour narrative of an unfolding news story.
“It was very, very tricky to untangle what was happening,” says Oliver. Eventually there came a flood of footage purporting to show images from inside the plane – but was it real? Each clip that the Guardian incorporated into our reporting had to be verified, particularly given the potential for AI-generated fakes. (The Guardian’s head of photography Fiona Shields is fascinating here on how we assess AI images.)
‘Netanyahu was trying to present himself as Mr. Security’
But this wasn’t just an aviation disaster. “It was taking place in this hugely sensitive geopolitical situation,” says Oliver. “The plane landed in Saudi Arabia which does not officially have diplomatic relations with Israel.”
The budget airline itself, flydubai, had by now suspended all its flights to and from Israel, but warned against “premature speculation” while multiple governments, and Israeli officials in particular, were doing just that.
This incident has occurred at a moment of extreme instability across the region, with the strait of Hormuz still closed as a result of the US-Israel assault on Iran and the resurgence of conflict in Yemen. It is also weeks ahead of knife-edge Israeli elections, with polls showing Netanyahu’s current coalition unlikely to meet the threshold needed to form a government but no clear path to power for his rivals.
Just days ago, Netanyahu warned Israel faced an unspecified attack risk during the election period – an assertion greeted with cynicism by political opponents. The Israeli military subsequently confirmed they had no specific intelligence of an anticipated attack. “Most people interpreted that as Netanyahu trying to stir up his base by presenting himself as Mr. Security,” says William.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s supporters consider him vindicated. On Thursday, William tells me, the Israeli foreign ministry started briefing diplomats that the flydubai incident was an attempt to drive a further wedge between the UAE and Israel, a relationship already strained after leaks suggesting Netanyahu was personally alerted to the 7 October attacks by the UAE president a week before it took place, something the president has denounced as “an absolute lie”.
‘These stories can be incredibly powerful’
It’s a challenging time to report a story like this, says Taz Ali, who led our live blog which covered the incident unfolding in real-time on Wednesday. “Readers are making connections with what’s happening in the Middle East in general, and you’re trying to answer their questions, first with very scant detail and later with a deluge of information, much of which is proved to be inaccurate.”
Taz, who has a decade of experience in reporting on global events, knows the human drama of a potential hijacking immediately grabs reader’s attention. “Often those stories can be incredibly powerful, involve emergency landings, and sometimes they end in great tragedies”. And with the recent 25th anniversary of 9/11, the incident had an even deeper resonance. “Especially with the anniversary happening so recently, those memories would have been so raw in people’s minds when they came to this story.”
Assaf Regavim filmed the first widely circulated video from inside the cabin. Photograph: Erik Marmor/Getty Images
