Bloodied Pilot, Rudder Gone, 174 Lives Saved: The Dramatic Story Behind Flydubai FZ1073

During flydubai Flight FZ1073, the co-pilot allegedly attacked the captain, sending the Boeing 737 MAX 8 into a terrifying high-speed dive that tore off its rudder. Despite severe injuries, the captain unlocked the cockpit door, allowing passengers to restrain the attacker.

When the flydubai Boeing 737 MAX 8 finally rolled to a halt on a Saudi Arabian runway, there was an empty space on its tail where the rudder should have been. All 174 people on board were alive. To understand why aviators are calling this a miracle, it helps to begin at that landing and work backwards.

The rudder is the movable vertical panel on an aircraft's tail, worked by the pilot's foot pedals. It swings the nose left or right, a movement called yaw, much like the steering fin at the back of a boat. On final approach, it keeps the nose lined up with the runway, especially when wind blows across it. Without a rudder, even a gentle crosswind can push the aircraft sideways and leave the crew with very little to correct it. Even a highly experienced 737 pilot would admit to never having attempted such a landing.

The two men who managed it were not the scheduled crew. They were pilots travelling as passengers, who walked into a blood-stained cockpit and inherited a wounded machine with damage they could not see or measure. They had no time to prepare and no way of knowing how the aircraft would respond.

Flight FZ1073 had left Dubai for Ben Gurion Airport in Israel. Soon after take-off, its transponder sent out code 7700, the international signal for a general emergency. It then switched to 7500, the code for possible unlawful interference such as a hijacking. These four-digit codes are a silent alarm to air traffic controllers, though by themselves they do not prove what happened on board. Israel reportedly scrambled fighter jets in response.

Inside the locked cockpit, the co-pilot, reported to be an Omani national, had allegedly stabbed the captain and tried to crash the aircraft. His nationality and motive have not been officially confirmed, though Israel's leadership has described the event as terror. The captain was Smit Machchhar, an Indian with more than 9,500 flying hours who had earlier flown for SpiceJet out of Mumbai. He suffered severe cuts to his head and hands.

At about 10:51 IST, over northwestern Saudi Arabia, the aircraft was cruising at 34,000 feet when it plunged. It lost roughly 14,300 feet in just 37 seconds and bottomed out near 16,600 feet. According to NDTV's analysis of flight-tracking data, the descent rate touched about 23,000 feet per minute, which means the aircraft was falling nearly 386 feet every second. The normal descent rate for an airliner is between 1,500 and 3,000 feet per minute, which is only 25 to 50 feet per second. This dive was therefore nearly eight times faster than the steepest normal descent. For those in the cabin, it would have felt like a lift whose cable had snapped.

As the height fell, the speed climbed. A cyclist rolling downhill gathers pace without pedalling, because height is being converted into speed. The same happened here, on a frightening scale. The aircraft touched about Mach 0.96, roughly 1,108 km/h. Mach is simply a fraction of the local speed of sound, which changes with air temperature and therefore with altitude, so the km/h figure is an approximation. Some reports suggest it briefly went supersonic.

No passenger jet is built for this. At such speeds, the air presses on the airframe with enormous force, enough to tear pieces away. The rudder assembly broke off, possibly made worse by pedal inputs during the life-and-death struggle at the controls.

A 737 cockpit door is armoured and can be opened only by a security code from outside or by hand from inside. Bleeding heavily and barely conscious, Captain Machchhar is believed to have reached back and opened it. A woman passenger in the washroom had already sensed something was wrong and alerted the cabin crew. Four passengers rushed in and helped restrain the attacker. A dentist, the only medical professional on board, stopped the captain's bleeding and kept him stable until shortly before landing.

Pulling out of a high-speed dive is a delicate task. If the pilot pulls back too sharply, the already strained wings and tail can fail. If he is too gentle, the ground arrives first. The entire ordeal, from dive to recovery, lasted about five minutes. The aircraft climbed, steadied, and then turned towards its emergency landing.

The full answers lie in the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, now with the Saudi authorities. What is already clear is that an Indian captain, gravely wounded, refused to give up his aircraft. Ordinary passengers showed extraordinary courage, and two off-duty pilots brought a broken jet safely home.

(Girish Linganna is an award-winning science communicator and a Defence, Aerospace & Geopolitical Analyst. He is the Managing Director of ADD Engineering Components India Pvt. Ltd., a subsidiary of ADD Engineering GmbH, Germany.)