October 5, 2026
On September 30th, the first officer on a FlyDubai 737 en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv attacked the captain with a cockpit crash axe. A panicked struggle followed as passengers and off-duty pilots rushed to the cockpit.
The first officer, Hamam al-Hammami, was subdued and the jet landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia — though not before it was pushed into a high-speed dive that tore away part of its tail. Nobody was killed. Injuries to the captain were serious but he’s expected to recover fully.
Al-Hammami’s exact intentions are uncertain. According to reports thus far, his most likely plan was to hijack the Boeing and fly it into a Tel Aviv skyscraper.
This was a close call. If the captain, 38 year-old Smith Machchhar, hadn’t managed to unlatch the cockpit door from inside, al-Hammami would have probably killed him and crashed the plane.
It later came to light that al-Hammami had been banned from commercial flying in his home country of Oman, apparently for espousing radical Islamist views. How FlyDubai, a large and successful carrier, managed to overlook this is a question that needs answering.
Goodness. It’s Germanwings all over again. Or EgyptAir flight 990. Or SilkAir 185. Air India 171. Malaysia 370. Sad but true, pilots have gone rogue and crashed airplanes before. That list is much too long. So long that, as shown recently in a Wall Street Journal article, suicidal pilots are becoming one of the biggest statistical threats to air safety. This is partly true because other causes of crashes have grown increasingly rare, but still it’s a bit frightening.
So how do we keep that list from growing?
Passing through aircrew security yesterday at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, the screeners were a little more tightly wound than usual. It took our crew a good half hour to get through, with our luggage enjoying lots of extra scrutiny. This kind of nervousness isn’t surprising, but neither is it logical. The weapon employed by al-Hammami wasn’t something he smuggled aboard; it was a piece of standard cockpit equipment. And heck, you can fashion a deadly weapon out of any number of innocuous things.
It’s not about hardware. It’s about the element of surprise. The danger was Hammami himself, not anything he was carrying. This was true of the others on that list above (and of the 9/11 hijackers as well).
We can, in the meantime, debate the merits of additional psychological screening. We also can, for what it’s worth, separate those acts committed in the name of religious or political beliefs from those motivated by mental illness — so much as those things are different. For the victims it hardy matters — murder is murder — but methods of detection might need to be developed separately.
At a certain point, however, there’s not a lot we can do. We’re forced to rely on a set of presumptions. It comes down to trust. The threat can never be zero, but it’s always going to be low — very low. I don’t want this to sound like an airline press release, but you can confidently presume that the people flying your plane are exactly what you want them to be: well-trained professionals for whom safety is their priority. As an airline pilot I do not leave for work wondering if one of my colleagues is going to kill me. I shouldn’t be expected to. And neither should passengers.
For someone like me, the most frustrating takeaway from this near-disaster is knowing that people around the world are getting on planes today and wondering, if only idly, if their pilots are potential mass-murderers. For the profession it’s about the biggest embarrassment we could suffer.
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