Saudi Arabia refused to allow Israeli military aircraft to land on its soil to collect Israeli passengers stranded after an Israel-bound FlyDubai flight made an emergency landing in the kingdom, according to two security sources cited by Reuters.
According to the account carried by the account @MarioNawfal, the Israeli Air Force was preparing Super Hercules transports to bring the passengers home from Tabuk, and Riyadh said no. The same reporting was carried by The Times of Israel, which noted that the request was made to allow Israeli military planes to bring back Israelis from a country that has no diplomatic relations with Israel. Saudi Arabia’s government media office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, according to that account.
The refusal is the latest development in a story that began Wednesday when FlyDubai flight FZ1073, bound from Dubai to Tel Aviv with more than one hundred seventy people on board, diverted to Tabuk. According to CBS News, the flight was forced to make the emergency landing after a violent attempt by one of the pilots to seize control of the aircraft and crash it, an account attributed to passengers and Israeli officials.
The Gateway Pundit reported that the aircraft plunged thousands of feet following an attack in the cockpit, and The Washington Times carried a guide to what it described as the terrifying flight, both as posts carried by @gatewaypundit and @WashTimes.
President Trump said he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at length about the incident. In remarks carried by CBS News, the president relayed the account he said he had received, describing a co-pilot who “was perhaps a terrorist or perhaps a wet job,” who stabbed the pilot, and a pilot who was in very bad shape but who had the presence of mind to open the cockpit door.
“He was able to fall back and get the door open and scream,” the president said. He described an Israeli plumber, seated toward the front of the cabin, who heard the screaming and, with the aircraft descending sharply, pulled the attacking man out of the seat and threw him back toward the passengers, who subdued him. The president said the man then took the controls and leveled the aircraft before it crashed, an act he attributed to what the man had learned from watching the television program Air Disasters.
“He grabbed the stick, pulled it up, leveled out the plane before it crashed,” the president said. “I think it’s the most amazing story.”
Trump acknowledged uncertainty about details, saying he did not know whether the attacking pilot intended to crash the aircraft and calling the story one he had heard from Netanyahu and others.
Netanyahu, in remarks carried by the account @clashreport, said the attacking pilot is now being interrogated in Saudi Arabia and is an Omani national.
“He’ll be, I assume, moved very quickly to Dubai,” Netanyahu said. “He’ll be investigated and interrogated, and we’ll join the interrogation and find out what happened there exactly.”
The Israeli official account, as summarized by The Jerusalem Post, described a major disaster avoided after a pilot stabbed his co-pilot and attempted to hijack the aircraft, which was carrying more than one hundred Israeli passengers. The Guardian reported that Israeli officials are investigating whether the incident was an attempted terror attack, and that the accused pilot is being questioned in Saudi Arabia.
Randy Klatt, a flight safety officer for the Foundation for Aviation Safety, told CBS News that two concerns stand out. The first is how an aircrew member got a weapon onto the aircraft at all.
“He had a weapon,” Klatt said. “That shouldn’t have happened.”
The second, he said, is how the emotional health of pilots is monitored day to day, and how closely that can be done given privacy constraints. He said more aggressive screening might catch such issues.
Klatt also described differences in how crew members are screened compared with passengers, pointing to dedicated crew access points at airports worldwide. He said such access points are manned and do screen personnel, but the extent varies by airport and country, and that bags are not always x-rayed.
“So that’s the loophole,” he said.
He noted that security for flights departing Dubai, where this aircraft originated, is handled by authorities there and would not necessarily be elevated for aircrew simply because the flight was bound for Israel. He credited the layered protections installed after the September eleventh attacks, including reinforced cockpit doors, access codes and a deny function controlled from inside the cockpit, and said the captain’s ability to reach the door during the struggle was decisive.
He added that other pilots traveling in the cabin in civilian clothes were able to take the controls and land the aircraft after the captain was injured and the attacking man subdued.
“We are very lucky that all those things aligned,” Klatt said.
Next News Network could not independently verify the accounts of the incident described by officials, passengers and the president.
It is not yet known what motivated the attacking pilot, what charges he may face, or when or where he will be transferred. It is also not yet known what further requests, if any, Israel has made to Saudi Arabia regarding the passengers still in Tabuk, or how they will be brought home.
Our Take
The reaction to this story has moved faster than the facts, and the facts are what matter most. What is established is narrow: an aircraft bound for Tel Aviv diverted to Tabuk, a cockpit struggle occurred, the flight landed, passengers survived, and the man accused of the attack is in Saudi custody being questioned. That is a genuine aviation security failure and a genuine counterterrorism question, and the screening gaps Klatt describes — crew access points, variable bag checks, the difficulty of monitoring a pilot’s mental state without trampling privacy — are the part of this story that will still matter after the cable news cycles move on.
What is not established is the full narrative. The most vivid version, relayed by the president from a conversation with a foreign leader, involves a plumber who had never flown an aircraft taking the controls and leveling a jet at extreme speed. It may prove accurate. It has not been verified, and it should not be treated as settled simply because it is memorable or because it came from a podium. The Saudi refusal to permit Israeli military aircraft on its soil is a reminder that even a humanitarian gesture runs into the hard realities of a region without diplomatic relations, and that the passengers stranded in Tabuk are dependent on arrangements that have not been announced. We will keep asking the questions until the interrogators in Saudi Arabia, and the flight data recorder now in hand, provide answers.
