FlyDubai hired the co-pilot accused of trying to crash a passenger jet into Israel as part of a rapid post-pandemic recruitment drive, the Wall Street Journal reports — and the airline never contacted his previous employer to check his record. The 29-year-old Omani pilot, Hamam al-Hammami, had already been flagged by authorities in Oman as too radical to fly before he ever sat in a FlyDubai cockpit.
What happened on Flight FZ1073
On September 30, FlyDubai Flight FZ1073 was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv with about 174 passengers and crew, most of them Israeli. Roughly two hours into the flight, co-pilot al-Hammami asked Captain Smit Machchhar if he could take a prayer break. Moments later, he allegedly struck the captain repeatedly with an emergency crash axe kept in the cockpit and forced the Boeing 737 MAX 8 into a steep dive.
Despite serious injuries, Captain Machchhar managed to open the locked cockpit door. Passengers and crew rushed in and overpowered al-Hammami, while two off-duty FlyDubai pilots traveling aboard took the controls and landed the plane safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. The UAE's attorney general, Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, has described the assault as an attempted terrorist act, and the investigation is ongoing. FlyDubai has suspended its Dubai-Tel Aviv route since the incident.
Red flags that were never shared
According to the Wall Street Journal, Omani authorities had scrutinized al-Hammami's online activity while he worked for Oman Air and concluded he showed too much interest in radical ideology to be trusted as a pilot. He was barred from flying, put through a deradicalization program, and moved to a desk job — but Oman never circulated its concerns widely enough to alert the UAE.
When FlyDubai hired him in February, the airline ran a criminal background check but did not contact Oman to verify his employment history, the report says. He had already failed stints with airlines in Oman and Morocco. The Journal also reports he had planned a similar attack in July but cancelled it at the last moment because a friend was among the crew, and that he trained as a pilot in Britain at the L3 Airline Academy between 2018 and 2019.
A recruitment boom under scrutiny
FlyDubai expanded aggressively after the pandemic, nearly doubling its staff from 3,682 in 2021 to 6,763 by the end of 2025, with pilot numbers rising from 658 to about 1,500. The airline ran hiring drives and expanded pilot training and cadet programs to keep up.
The case has also exposed a security gap on the Israeli side. Israel bars pilots from countries with which it has no diplomatic relations — including Oman — yet the country never struck al-Hammami from advance crew lists. More than 1,200 crew members from banned countries, including Syria, Lebanon, and Oman, have flown into Israel since the start of the year, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by the Journal.
Captain Machchhar has been widely praised for his actions. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and US President Donald Trump all commended his bravery, and a billboard tribute was erected on Israel's Highway 4 honoring the Indian captain who helped save 174 lives.
Music in this post's reel: Kevin MacLeod - Long Road Ahead B (incompetech.com), licensed under CC BY 3.0