The Blogs: Everyday Heroes on Flight 1073

Someone asked me if I was going to write about Flydubai Flight FZ1073.

The truth is, I hadn’t thought about it.

I had read the story, watched the footage and, like so many others, been stunned by the almost unbelievable chain of events that allowed a plane carrying more than 170 passengers to land safely.

But I hadn’t thought, I need to write about this.

Then came the question.

And it made me wonder: What could I possibly add?

The miracle was already obvious to me. The hand of Hashem seemed impossible not to see.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that what stayed with me was not only that the right people were there.

It was what they did once they were there.

On Wednesday, September 30, during Sukkot, Flydubai Flight FZ1073 was traveling from Dubai to Tel Aviv when the unimaginable happened.

According to Israeli officials and passenger accounts, the co-pilot attacked and stabbed Captain Smit Machchhar, and the aircraft went into a terrifying descent, losing nearly 14,000 feet in less than 30 seconds.

Machchhar was seriously wounded.

Yet somehow, in those critical moments, he managed to open the cockpit door.

That single action opened the way for everything that followed.

Because on the other side of that door were people who moved.

Not commandos.

Not counterterrorism experts.

Passengers.

And perhaps one of the smallest details in this entire story is also one of the ones that stops me in my tracks.

Six-year-old Nina Manes needed to use the bathroom.

Her mother, Tali, got up to take her.

That completely ordinary request put Tali near the cockpit at exactly the moment something was going terribly wrong.

Tali later recounted hearing strange noises from inside, followed by unusual knocking on the cockpit door. She alerted a flight attendant and persisted when she felt he wasn’t reacting urgently enough.

When the door opened and she saw blood and violence inside, she began screaming for help.

Think about that.

A six-year-old needed the bathroom.

That’s it.

She had no idea she was putting anything into motion.

Neither did her mother.

But that tiny, everyday moment placed Tali exactly where she needed to be to hear what others could not, recognize that it mattered, and refuse to ignore it.

Then others moved.

Yaniv Hayun, a plumber traveling with his family, rushed toward the cockpit and helped overpower the attacker. With the aircraft diving, he pulled back on the controls—something he later said he knew to do because he watches Air Crash Investigation.

That detail produced one of the few moments of comic relief in this entire story.

I saw someone joke online that this man watched Air Crash Investigation and used what he learned to help level a plunging airplane, while he had been watching MasterChef for years and still couldn’t make an omelet.

Fair point.

But also—what are the chances?

Assaf Rajuan, who owns an insurance agency and was returning from a family vacation, joined the fight.

Zvika Manes, a capital-markets executive traveling with Tali and their daughter, helped restrain the attacker.

Dr. Shota Musaev, a dentist, rushed forward as well, helping during the struggle and then treating the badly wounded captain.

Additional Flydubai pilots who happened to be aboard ultimately helped regain control of the aircraft and bring it safely down in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

According to one passenger account, those pilots initially froze as the plane was diving and had to be shaken into action. One recovered and took control while the other needed longer to come out of the shock. That specific sequence has not been independently verified.

But even that possibility feels relevant.

Because courage does not necessarily mean never freezing.

Sometimes fear hits first.

Heroism can be what happens next.

And then there is the plane itself.

Because apparently everything I had already read about this story was not extraordinary enough.

Aviation expert Steve Ganyard explained that the Boeing 737 MAX was traveling at roughly 600 miles per hour while pointed toward the ground—beyond the speed the aircraft was designed to withstand.

At those speeds, parts of an aircraft can begin to tear away.

Part of the rudder reportedly did.

Pulling an aircraft out of such a dive creates enormous gravitational forces, with the potential to severely damage the plane or even its wings.

Yet a passenger with no flying experience pulled back on the controls.

The plane leveled.

The wings stayed on.

And 174 passengers were still alive.

How many layers of this story am I supposed to call coincidence?

At some point, I simply can’t.

I see the hand of Hashem all over it.

And apparently I am not the only one.

Adam Polovincik was aboard the flight with his children. He later told the BBC that he is not religious.

And yet after everything he witnessed, even he described what happened as the “hand of God,” saying it felt as though the pieces had been placed where they needed to be.

That stopped me.

Because that is exactly what I see too.

The pieces.

A child who needed the bathroom.

A mother who listened.

A wounded captain who somehow opened a door.

Passengers willing to run toward it.

A man who, at the most critical moment imaginable, remembered how to help pull an aircraft out of a dive because of knowledge he had absorbed years earlier from watching a television show.

That knowledge wasn’t incidental.

It was life-saving.

Medical knowledge was there.

Qualified pilots were there.

And an aircraft pushed far beyond conditions it was designed to withstand somehow held together.

Hashem may have arranged the pieces.

He did not make their choices for them.

Tali still had to insist something was wrong.

The captain still had to open the door.

The passengers still had to run toward it.

Someone had to fight the attacker.

Someone had to grab the controls.

Someone had to treat the wounded.

Someone had to fly the plane.

For me, that is the extraordinary partnership at the heart of this story.

Hashgacha put them there.

Bechira made them heroes.

I recently heard someone describe something about Israelis since October 7 that I have not been able to shake.

Since that morning, so many Israelis have carried a kind of video somewhere in the back of their minds.

What would I do if it happened again?

It is a grim thought.

An awful thought.

But a very real one.

Would I freeze?

Would I run?

Would I fight?

Would I be able to protect the person beside me?

October 7 forced Israelis to contemplate questions people should never have to contemplate.

It also showed us what ordinary people can do when there is no time to wait for somebody else.

People drove south toward the massacre while others were fleeing from it.

People rescued strangers.

People opened their homes.

People went back because someone was still missing.

People woke up that morning as ordinary civilians and, within hours, found themselves facing unimaginable circumstances.

I cannot help wondering whether some version of that same internal video had been playing quietly in the minds of the Israelis aboard Flight 1073.

Because when their moment came, there wasn’t much time to deliberate.

Something was terribly wrong in the cockpit.

The plane was falling.

People were in danger.

So they moved.

What has struck me since is their humility.

They don’t seem particularly interested in standing alone as the hero.

They were traveling with spouses and children.

Returning from vacations.

Trying to get home.

Then ordinary life disappeared, and something extraordinary was required of them.

And then they came home.

Their replacement flight landed at Ben Gurion Airport, where families, journalists and well-wishers were waiting.

So was the Prime Minister of Israel.

Benjamin Netanyahu was there to greet the returning passengers. In footage from the airport, he meets Yaniv Hayun still wearing the white shirt stained with blood from what had happened only hours earlier.

Netanyahu embraces him.

He looks at the blood on his shirt.

And he tells him he is a hero.

There is something about that scene that moves me deeply.

Hours earlier, Hayun had simply been another passenger trying to get home.

Now his family was beside him, the evidence of what he had just lived through still on his clothes, and the Prime Minister of his country was waiting at the airport to thank him.

Not to make him a hero.

That had already happened thousands of feet above the ground.

But to recognize what he and the others had done before they had even had time to change their clothes.

There is something deeply Israeli about that.

And still, before any of them could act, there was Captain Machchhar.

Badly wounded and fighting for his own life, he somehow created the opening through which help could come.

Without that door opening, this could have been a very different story.

Perhaps miracles are not always Hashem suspending the laws of nature.

Perhaps sometimes they begin much earlier.

In who happens to be sitting where.

Who gets up at precisely the right moment.

Who notices something.

Who refuses to dismiss what she hears.

Who carries a piece of knowledge that once seemed completely ordinary and suddenly becomes life-saving.

Who happens to have the skills someone desperately needs.

Who is willing to move when the moment comes.

Sometimes the details seem almost too small to matter.

A child needs the bathroom.

A man watches a television show.

A dentist boards a flight.

Until suddenly they matter enormously.

And then there is Sukkot.

Of all weeks for this to happen.

On Sukkot, we deliberately leave the perceived security of our permanent homes and sit beneath one of the most fragile roofs imaginable.

We remind ourselves that our security was never really the concrete wall.

It was never really the roof.

The sukkah itself cannot truly protect us.

That is precisely the point.

We step inside something fragile and remind ourselves of Who has been protecting us all along.

And during Sukkot, more than 170 passengers found themselves inside something that suddenly felt infinitely more fragile—a metal tube thousands of feet above the earth, plunging toward the ground.

At that moment, no wall could guarantee their safety.

No sophisticated aircraft system could promise what would happen next.

And yet somehow, the protection they needed was already there.

Maybe the embrace had begun before they ever took off.

Not as some supernatural hand reaching down at the final second.

But in the people already sitting among them.

The sukkah does not promise that frightening things will never happen.

It reminds us Who is with us when they do.

And then I saw people online pointing out something else.

I did not come up with this connection, and I don’t know who first noticed it.

But once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.

The flight number was 1073.

10 / 7 / 3.

October 7.

Three years.

Days before we mark three years since the morning that changed Israel forever.

Is it simply a flight number?

Yes.

Could those numbers be entirely coincidental?

Of course.

Faith does not require me to turn every coincidence into a Divine sign.

But neither does faith require me to pretend that something does not move me when it does.

And this moved me.

Because three years after October 7, Israelis aboard Flight 1073 suddenly found themselves confronting a question so many have silently rehearsed ever since:

What will I do if the unthinkable happens again?

On Flight 1073, they got their answer.

And that brings me to a song by Hatikva 6 that I have loved since it came out after October 7.

Giborei Al.

Superheroes.

Its message has resonated so deeply because the superheroes it describes aren’t characters from another universe.

They’re us.

People with jobs and families, errands and worries, children to pick up and vacations to take.

They walk around looking completely ordinary.

Until life asks something extraordinary of them.

Flight 1073 feels like another verse of that song.

Nobody boarded that plane wearing a cape.