SDJW staff report
“Hero” Israeli plumber Yaniv Hayun and several fellow passengers subdued the murderous Omani copilot of FlyDubai Flight 1073. He was too embarrassed at first to accept a congratulatory hug from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after the Boeing 737 Max 8 aircraft landed safely at Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport.
Netanyahu, you see, was wearing a business suit and Hayun was wearing a formerly white T-shirt and informal pants, which now were soaked with the assailant’s blood, and perhaps the blood of the Indian pilot, Capt. Smit Machchhar, who was wounded in what Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz later described as “an attempted jihadist terror attack.”
The prime minister smiled his permission and then gave Hayun him a well-deserved bear hug.
Machchhar was a hero too, fighting off his copilot and although bloodied by the stabbing attack, managing to open the door of the cockpit from the inside, allowing Hayun and companions to storm in. During the fight, the airplane was in freefall, going from its cruising altitude of 37,000 feet in less than two minutes to 20,000 feet.
Hayun told the prime minister that although he had never flown a plane before, he was able to grab the controls and level the plane off, before an auxiliary crew which had been deadheading in the back of the Boeing aircraft took over. They made an emergency landing at a civilian airport in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.
Netanyahu, awed, asked Hayun how he even knew what to do. Hayun said his favorite television program was Air Crash Investigation.
Both Machchhar and his attacker were taken off the plane in Saudi Arabia. The attacker faced interrogation by law enforcement officials; Machchhar would be examined by doctors. Some additional crew members were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.
The rest of the passengers were greeted at Ben-Gurion Airport by a singing, dancing, cheering crowd.
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Compiled by the staff of San Diego Jewish World.