The world was shaken by the attack on Indian pilot Smit Machchhar by his co-pilot on the Dubai to Tel Aviv flydubai flight FZ1073 carrying more than 182 people , and the alleged subsequent attempt to hijack the plane on Wednesday. it could have looked very different if there hadn’t been two mystery pilots on the flight who turned back and ultimately landed the plane in Saudi Arabia While the danger was averted.
Nor has any media outlet reported who the duo were. But who are the mystery pilots who stepped in to stabilise the flight as it hurtled toward disaster? Flydubai has called them only on-duty crew members travelling on the plane. The two spare pilots are not present on every flight, but it does happen in the airline industry sometimes, under a practice which is called deadheading.
As of Sunday morning, four days after the flydubai flight plummeted by around 17,000 feet amid the panic aboard , the identities of the two spare pilots who were miraculously on the plane still haven’t been publicly released.
It’s not clear why the airline hasn’t said more. One passenger, who was said to be at the front of the plane, described the men’s actions in an interview with The Associated Press, though. “This is one of the miracles,” said Daniel Schlichter, who said he was seated in the second row.
The two pilots responded after screaming passengers discovered what was unfolding in the cockpit. The captain, while badly wounded, managed to unlock the cockpit door. “He was actually kind of jumping above the guys that were handling the terrorist, and he reached out to the pilot area and started to take over. Schlichter, like others, wasn’t sure where the two men had come from. But whoever the first one was, he moved very quickly. A mayday call was made as the men frantically sought a place to land. Meanwhile, some of the frightened and wary passengers wondered about them and whether they could be trusted. And it turned out to be true.
But he said that after about 45 minutes, the pilots announced they would be landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, and that everything was going to be OK. Because they didn’t want anybody else to be there,” Schlichter said, and then the other guy, the other pilot, joined in, and they closed the door. Because we’re actually not too far, he worried about an even worse situation – that the men might be “hijacking the plane into maybe Iran, or I don’t know where,.
“In this case, they brought them because they should have brought the plane back from Tel Aviv to Dubai, and this is the only reason they were there,” Schlichter said. They said the copilot, now identified as Omani national Hamman Al Hammami in media reports , was attacking the captain, Smit Machchhar from India , over and over, and blood was everywhere. After a passenger grabbed the copilot and pulled him out, and others grappled with the man to subdue him, Schlichter said that one of the travelling pilots practically hurdled the scrum to enter the cockpit and seize the controls. “He acted really like a hero, taking over the plane and reacted like he understood exactly what is going on, and I think we owe him our lives not less than the other heroes that went on the flight,” Schlichter said. Once the two entered the cockpit and closed the door, Schlichter said he wasn’t sure who did what inside. It took “quite a lot of minutes,” maybe 10 or more, to stabilise the plane after a descent so extreme that part of its rudder was torn away. “After they managed to stabilise the airplane, actually they did not have any communication with us, and I have to tell you, I was worried about this,” Schlichter said. Schlichter said he decided to trust them after the announcement.
