In the hours since reports emerged of an alleged terror attack aboard a flydubai flight bound for Israel, one question has dominated: how was a pilot able to access a weapon inside the cockpit and seriously injure his colleague, sending the aircraft into a dangerous descent and forcing it to divert to Saudi Arabia? The details remain under investigation. Initial reports suggested that the Omani co-pilot had used a knife, possibly cutlery from the aircraft, to attack Indian captain Smit Machchhar.
&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Flydubai flight attack: Why was a crash axe inside the cockpit? Was it used to attack Captain Smit Machchhar?")
Hero recounts terrifying descent as pᴀssengers screamed and crew fought to regain control
Machchhar’s co-pilot was praying, something the captain said was not unusual. Out of respect, Machchhar kept his eyes towards the front of the cockpit while his colleague prayed behind him.
Four or five minutes later, something slammed into the back of his head.
At first, the veteran pilot did not realise he was being attacked. He thought something catastrophic had happened to the aircraft.
“My first thought was that there was catastrophic damage to the aircraft, that something is not right,” Machchhar recalled.
Dubai: It was an ordinary moment on what had, until then, been an ordinary flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv.
Then came another blow. And another.
That was when he understood.
“It’s not the aircraft, it’s the other guy who is in the cockpit with me.”
Speaking to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about Wednesday’s terrifying events aboard flydubai flight FZ1073, the seriously injured captain has now given one of the clearest accounts yet of the struggle inside the cockpit — and the moment he realised the lives of 174 people could depend on what he did next.
‘My vision was almost like nothing’
Machchhar tried to fight back, but the initial blows had left him badly injured.
“I did try and stop him, but because of his initial blows, my vision was almost like nothing, and I was completely blurred out,” he said.
His memories of what followed remain fragmented.
But one sensation is unmistakable: The aircraft was going down.
“At that point, the next feeling I had was that the aircraft was sharply going down,” he said.
Flight FZ1073 had been cruising at around 34,000 feet when it transmitted emergency signals and descended more than 17,000 feet.
Machchhar recalled managing at one point to open the cockpit door, only for it to be shut again.
Then he found himself on the cockpit floor.
“I felt the aircraft and the whooshing sound and people screaming,” he said.
‘I gave everything that I had’
Bloodied, his vision impaired and the aircraft descending, Machchhar believed he had one opportunity left.
“And as I was telling the Ambᴀssador here, I had that one last fight left in me,” he said.
What drove him at that moment, he said, was partly instinct for survival.
“Call it personal or call it for people, I did it because if I didn’t do it, I was going to die.”
He summoned what strength remained.
“I pushed against everything … I gave everything that I had and went for the door and opened the door.”
People outside were waiting.
“Thankfully, people were waiting to pounce back … took over control and the rest is what you know.”
The Boeing 737-8, carrying 174 pᴀssengers, including 27 children, was eventually diverted to Prince Sultan Bin Abdel Aziz Airport in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.
Videos circulated after the emergency showed Machchhar covered in blood, wearing an oxygen mask and lying on his back in the aircraft galley.
‘You saved so many souls’
Netanyahu praised Machchhar during their conversation, telling him his actions had resonated far beyond the aircraft.
“You saved so many souls,” Netanyahu said, calling him “a hero of Israel”, India and “the entire world”.
He told Machchhar he was amazed by his courage and “coolness of judgment under impossible conditions”.
Netanyahu said he wanted Captain Machchhar and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, one of Israel’s key international partners, to light a flame at a national ceremony for Israel’s Independence Day next May, saying the role was usually reserved for Israeli citizens.
“You are a true hero of the brave peoples of India and Israel and you are a hero of the entire world,” Netanyahu said in a video his office released of his telephone conversation with the hospitalised captain.
The conversation came a day after Modi spoke to the pilot by telephone.
Modi said Machchhar had demonstrated “immense courage and unwavering resolve” despite suffering serious injuries.
For the Mumbai-born pilot, the praise follows more than 13 years in commercial aviation.
Machchhar, who is in his mid-30s, has logged more than 9,500 flying hours. He joined flydubai in June 2022 after spending more than a decade with SpiceJet, where he also worked as a Line Training Captain. His brother is also a flydubai pilot.
Investigation continues
The UAE, which is leading the investigation, said on Saturday that preliminary findings showed the co-pilot had attempted to carry out a “terrorist act”.
UAE Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said the captain was attacked inside the flight deck with a crash axe and that the co-pilot attempted to take control of the aircraft.
Media reports have identified the co-pilot as Omani citizen Hamam Al Hammami, although his idenтιтy has not been officially confirmed.
The Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that he had previously been barred from flying in Oman over concerns about radical ideological views. CNN, citing sources, also reported that concerns about his views had previously led to his removal from flight training. Authorities are continuing to investigate the motive, his background and any possible links.
But Machchhar’s account brings the focus back to the minutes inside the cockpit when there was little time to understand what was happening.
He had been struck repeatedly. His vision was blurred. He was on the floor. The aircraft was descending and he could hear the screams of pᴀssengers behind him.
Yet there was still the cockpit door.
And, as Machchhar put it, “one last fight” left in him.
💔 STELLA PARTON BREAKS HER SILENCE — What She Said About Dolly’s Health Has Fans Looking Back
Dolly Parton’s Sister Breaks Silence What Really Happened - GMT - G1
Stella Parton was born May 4, 1949, the sixth of twelve children raised by Robert Lee and Avie Lee Parton in Sevierville, Tennessee — a household defined by noise, limited money, and almost no privacy, the kind of environment that produced strong, determined personalities.
Stella was one of them.
By seven, she was appearing alongside her older sister Dolly on a Knoxville television program; by her teens, she was writing her own songs, though marriage and motherhood pulled music to the margins of her life for a stretch.
The dream never fully disappeared.
In 1967, she recorded a gospel album with her mother and sisters, and later worked clubs in Washington, D.C., before founding her own record label in 1975 and releasing “I Want to Hold You in My Dreams Tonight,” which climbed to number nine on the country charts.
Long before any of that commercial success, Stella had already shown a willingness to take positions others avoided.
At 26, amid backlash against Australian singer Olivia Newton-John for winning recognition in country music, Stella recorded “Ode to Olivia” in her defense — a stand that offered her no career benefit and real risk of criticism, but one she took anyway simply because she believed staying silent was the wrong choice.
That instinct defined the rest of her career: hits like “The Danger of a Stranger” and “Steady as the Rain” (written by Dolly) built a genuine, independent following, including in the U.K., while Stella also worked in New York theater and spoke openly, often controversially, about poverty, domestic violence, and the treatment of women in the music industry.
She was named the Christian Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year in 2004.
Through all of it, she remained defined publicly, more often than not, as simply “Dolly’s little sister” — a label she spent five decades quietly proving didn’t tell the full story.
That same directness is why her comments in the fall of 2025 carried real weight.
Stella had never positioned herself as the family’s image manager or spokesperson; she was, by reputation, someone who believed difficult truths shouldn’t stay hidden indefinitely.
What she described wasn’t dramatic or accusatory — it was a portrait of a woman who had spent years prioritizing everyone else’s needs over her own.
The context mattered.
Carl Dean, Dolly’s husband of nearly sixty years, died in March 2025 at 82, after a long illness during which Dolly had devoted herself almost entirely to his care.
She later acknowledged that in the process, she’d neglected her own health significantly.
The loss reverberated through the whole extended family — the Partons had lost three brothers in the years surrounding this period, compounding grief that, for a family that had once crowded twelve children into a single small home, meant losing pieces of a shared childhood one after another.
Stella herself went seven years without releasing new music during this stretch, later describing the period simply as one shaped by sorrow, while still speaking about the importance of finding moments of laughter within it.
Looking back, one moment reads very differently in hindsight than it did at the time: in late September 2025, Dolly postponed her planned Las Vegas residency, citing health challenges — a rare cancellation for a performer whose six-decade career had included very few of them.
At the time, most fans treated it as a minor, temporary setback.
Stella’s later reflections suggested the signs had actually been building for some time, visible to family in ways the public smile made easy to miss.
That concern crystallized publicly not long after, when Dolly’s younger sister Frieda posted a simple request on Facebook asking fans to pray for Dolly.
What looked at first like an ordinary, well-meaning gesture spread rapidly, sparking widespread speculation about how serious Dolly’s condition actually was.
Dolly herself responded directly within days, appearing in a video from a Grand Ole Opry commercial shoot, insisting with her familiar humor that she wasn’t finished yet — the now widely remembered “I ain’t dead yet” moment that briefly quieted public concern.
In the months that followed, the pattern repeated: reassuring updates about kidney stones, dehydration, and treatment, paired with continued work on new projects, right up until Dolly Parton’s death on August 25, 2026, at 80.
Looking back across that full timeline — the postponed residency, the family’s public worry, Stella’s own account of a sister who consistently deprioritized her own wellbeing — it becomes easier to see what the people closest to Dolly understood well before the rest of the world did: that the warmth and resilience the public saw every time she appeared on camera came at a real, largely invisible cost.
