The Flydubai story I haven’t forgotten

A pilot friend of mine, who isn’t Israeli, had a question for Yaniv Hayun, the Israeli plumber who helped save a Flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv after an attack in the cockpit on September 30. Was there something in Israeli culture or education that encouraged people to think beyond the obvious, improvise and act?

Yaniv was in South Africa this week, where I am currently based, speaking at public events in Cape Town and Johannesburg. If there was an opportunity for questions, my friend wanted me to ask. I didn’t get the chance.

Yaniv’s account included a moment of humor. As the aircraft approached Saudi Arabia, he used the intercom to tell the Israeli passengers to adopt the brace position. He joked that this was probably the first and last time Israelis would all do as they were told.

I don’t have a neat answer to my friend’s question. I’m not sure one man’s courage can answer that. And Yaniv himself was one of several passengers and crew who helped save the flight. But his story brought me back to another Flydubai flight, and another man who decided to speak.

In March 2016, my editors woke me during the night and told me to get to Dubai. A Flydubai aircraft, which had departed from there, had crashed at Rostov-on-Don in southern Russia, killing all 62 people aboard. But once in the emirate, it was almost impossible to get anyone to talk to me.

I found the story of Anna Sergeeva, a 25-year-old who worked in a nail salon. At her table, where she had chatted with customers just days earlier, there was now a photograph and a candle. One of her clients told me Anna had moved to Dubai to help support her mother in Ukraine. She had been excited about traveling to Russia to see friends.

There were families trying to reach Rostov, colleagues grieving for crew members and people frightened to look through the passenger list in case they recognized a name. Anna’s client had been checking with mutual friends to make sure they were safe. Through those conversations, she discovered how many people around her knew someone on the flight. There was also a young woman who had woken up late and missed the flight.

The loss spread through ordinary connections: a customer and her nail technician, colleagues who had shaken hands before the flight, a family waiting for someone to come home. Getting beyond the immediate grief was difficult. I was preparing to leave when a message arrived: a former Flydubai pilot was willing to talk. Did I want to meet him?

I stayed.

The man who came forward was deeply upset. I checked his credentials. We concealed his identity and altered his voice. He described working patterns at Flydubai that, he said, left pilots exhausted: morning duties followed by late duties and overnight flights, with their bodies struggling to adjust. He said repeated complaints about fatigue had fallen on deaf ears.

“It’s legal but there’s a lot of things legal that are just wrong,” he told me. The pilot acknowledged that a schedule could comply with the rules while still leaving a pilot poorly rested for the work ahead. He gave me documents, including a roster and internal safety reports. What had begun as an assignment about a crash became an investigation I pursued for weeks. The broadcaster called it “FlyDubaiGate”.

After we broke the story, other pilots started contacting us. Some worked for Flydubai; others had left. We heard from staff at Emirates and other airlines. My inbox filled with accounts of fatigue, difficult schedules and fears about the consequences of speaking publicly.

I began recording more interviews and receiving further documents. Some people wrote about colleagues they had lost; others described concerns at their own airlines. Whereas I had once struggled to get anyone to talk, I now had more people coming forward than I could immediately follow up on. That did not make every allegation true. Each account still needed checking, and the aviation experts consulted differed over whether the roster we obtained showed cause for concern.

Reading those emails again now, I found the airline’s response. Flydubai said the safety and welfare of its crews were a priority and that it strictly followed authorized flying-duty-time regulations when preparing rosters.

The subsequent investigation was led by Russia’s Interstate Aviation Committee with participation from representatives of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), United States and France. The final accident report, published in 2019, drew on the flight recorders and other evidence. Investigators concluded that the crew lost control during their second attempt to abort a landing and climb away. Incorrect aircraft configuration and handling were followed by the captain’s loss of situational awareness. They did not establish that the pilots had fallen asleep.

Investigators found no breaches of work-and-rest rules during the period examined and said the crew had sufficient rest before departure. They nevertheless identified possible tiredness accumulated during the flight as a contributing factor: six hours flying, including two under intense workload, at a low point in the body’s daily rhythm. The findings were more complicated than the certainty expressed in some of those early emails.

What happened on the Israel-bound flight this September was different. UAE prosecutors said the co-pilot had planned to seize the aircraft and crash it into the passenger terminal at Ben Gurion Airport. There is no evidence connecting that attack to the fatigue allegations I investigated a decade ago. Those reports cannot tell us about working conditions at the airline today.

Hearing Yaniv’s story sent me back to people I had interviewed, and to correspondence I hadn’t read for years. The circumstances were entirely different. But I still remember that pilot sitting opposite me, deeply upset and determined to speak.

My friend’s question about Israeli initiative remains with me. Perhaps Yaniv has an answer. I would still like to ask him.

For Israelis, Ben Gurion Airport is where people leave on holiday, collect visitors and come home. Most board a flight expecting the journey to be the uneventful part of whatever awaits. Anna was going to see friends. Yaniv was traveling with his family. Behind every account of an aircraft in trouble are people who had expected, quite reasonably, to arrive.