TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A fight between pilots on a commercial plane traveling from the United Arab Emirates to Israel forced the aircraft to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, according to two officials. The episode raised concerns about a possible hijacking of a plane carrying dozens of Israelis and prompted Israel to scramble warplanes.
The FlyDubai flight landed safely. But Israel believes there may have been an attempt to
attack Israelis, and an investigation is ongoing, an Israeli official said.
Around two and a half hours after departing from Dubai, the plane sent an emergency alert, according to publicly available flight tracking information.
The flight abruptly descended from 33,000 feet to 17,000 feet (around 10,000 meters to 5,100 meters) in about the space of a minute, before making an erratic circle close to the Jordanian border and eventually landing in Tabuk about an hour later, according to Flightradar24.
The Israeli official said a fight broke out between two pilots, one of whom was armed with a knife. A regional official briefed on the incident also said a fight broke out in the cockpit and apparently involved pilots.
“The crew have been questioned as part of the investigation,” the regional official added but did not say if anyone had been detained. They said it wasn’t immediately clear what caused the fight.
A third official confirmed that Israel had scrambled warplanes, fearing a hijacking. All three officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident was under investigation.
The aircraft’s captain and the first officer were injured and taken to the hospital, according to a statement from the Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Airport in Tabuk carried by the Saudi state-run Alekhbariya television. Passengers were receiving medical attention from local authorities, according to another regional official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned in recent days of unspecified, escalated security threats. The country is days away from marking the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel, weeks away from an election, and has been embroiled in multiple conflicts in the last three years.
Netanyahu’s office said the situation was under control and Israel was working to bring the passengers home.
Yasmin Abukasis, whose daughter was on the flight, said her daughter told her in a phone call that she could hear someone screaming “help!”
Abukasis added that her daughter said the plane started to lose control, causing passengers to scream in fear. She said eventually two people — who she said were pilots — were able to wrest control of the plane, while other people attempted to subdue an attacker on the floor of the plane. She said her daughter said there was a lot of blood and chaos.
She did not say who the attacker was.
Passengers told Israel’s Channel 12 by phone that they also heard shouts from those sitting closer to the front of the plane who heard an altercation between the pilots, and the plane dipped steeply before landing in Saudi Arabia.
The airport in Tabuk reported that a FlyDubai flight made a distress call at 8:44 a.m. local time, before landing safely at 9:45 a.m. local time.
FlyDubai confirmed that flight FZ 1073 en route to Ben Gurion Airport experienced an incident and landed in Tabuk on Wednesday.
“Our teams are working closely with the relevant authorities,” the carrier said.
Israelis were targeted in a string of hijackings and airplane attacks by Palestinian militants in the 1960s and 1970s. Israel has not experienced a hijacking in decades but maintains some of the strictest airport security in the world, including on Israel-bound flights.
The emergency landing in Saudi Arabia was not the first for a plane carrying Israelis home. The kingdom does not have formal diplomatic ties with Israel, but ended its longstanding ban on Israeli flights overflying its territory in 2022. Since then, Saudi Arabia has coordinated multiple emergency landings for Israeli passengers, including in 2023 when a plane experienced an electrical malfunction.
The UAE has become a popular vacation destination for Israeli tourists since the countries normalized ties in 2020. FlyDubai is the lower-cost sister carrier of Emirates airlines.
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Magdy reported from Cairo and Metz from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Adam Schreck in Bangkok and Ami Ben Tov in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed to this report.
