Dubai to Israel flight diverts to Saudi Arabia after one pilot reportedly stabs another

A FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Israel was forced to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday after an apparent altercation in the cockpit, raising concerns about a possible hijacking and prompting Israel to scramble fighter jets.

Israeli media outlets, citing security officials, said the incident stemmed from a fight between the commercial plane's two pilots and that everyone on board was safe after it landed in Tabuk, where there is a civilian airport adjacent to a Saudi military base.

The Jerusalem Post reported that one pilot tried to hijack the plane but was subdued by other members of the flight crew and passengers, citing an unnamed Israeli official who told the newspaper that a "major disaster was narrowly avoided."

A female passenger told Israel Hayom that one pilot was stabbed during the brawl, and Israeli passengers intervened to stop the fighting. 

"There are people here with shirts covered in blood," she said, describing the incident as "very stressful." Videos shared on social media corroborated her account, showing at two men on the floor with blood smeared on and around them.

A passenger speaking to the Jerusalem Post said one pilot stabbed the other and tried to force him out of the cockpit as the plane began to plummet. The passenger told the newspaper a group of Israeli passengers near the front of the aircraft rushed to fight the attacker as the plane lost altitude. 

The witness said the intervening passengers shouted at two off-duty pilots at the back of the plane "to run and take control" of it, and one of them did so after the passengers managed to remove the attacker from the cockpit.

Israeli sources told the Post the would-be hijacker was an Omani national. There was no immediate confirmation of the details from Israeli or Saudi officials.

The crew of FlyDubai flight 1073, a Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft, transmitted an emergency alert shortly after takeoff on Wednesday, according to publicly available flight tracking information.

CBS News' British partner network BBC News said flight tracking data showed the aircraft plummeted more than 17,000 feet in two minutes around 8:21 a.m. local time.

Yasmin Abukasis, whose daughter was on the flight, told journalists at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport, where the plane had been due to land, that her daughter heard screaming as a pilot called for help.

"The plane start to lose control. So all the people, they scream," she said.

A regional official briefed on the incident told the Associated Press a fight broke out in the cockpit apparently involving the pilots, but the official did not say what had caused the altercation. The AP cited a second official confirming that Israel had scrambled warplanes, fearing a possible hijacking of the plane carrying dozens of Israeli citizens. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned in recent days of unspecified, escalating security threats to Israel and its interests amid its ongoing operations against Iran-allied Hamas in the Gaza Strip and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Netanyahu's office later issued a statement saying the situation was under control and Israel was working to bring the passengers home.

The BBC reported that a recovery flight was on its way to Tabuk to pick up the passengers from the diverted plane.

Emergency landings for personnel reasons are rare but not unheard of. In 2022, two Air France pilots were suspended after fighting in the cockpit on a Geneva-to-Paris flight, though the plane landed as scheduled in the French capital.

FlyDubai is the lower-cost sister carrier of the United Arab Emirates state-owned flagship carrier Emirates airlines. The UAE has become a popular vacation destination for Israeli tourists since the two nations normalized ties in 2020.

Israel has not experienced a plane hijacking in decades, but it maintains some of the strictest airport security in the world. 

Israel's far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, in a social media post on Wednesday, said "the naive notion that our enemies value life and that we should have mercy on them received another reminder this morning in the form of a terrorist who planned to crash a plane and murder the 180 Israelis on board."

Israeli politician Benny Gantz, who is running in upcoming Israeli elections but polling badly, wrote on X: "It's still too early to know what the sequence of events was in this morning's Flydubai flight to Israel, but it's already clear that Israelis are a rare breed."

"The resourcefulness and courage displayed by the passengers on this flight, in the face of clear mortal danger, are exactly the stuff our people are made of," he said.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee also posted about the incident Wednesday, saying: "Well this had everyone in the Middle East (esp Israel) on FULL ALERT this morning."  

"Glad it wasn't more serious," he added, "but having pilots inflight detouring to 'fist city' not your ordinary experience."