Mumbai: Indian pilot Smit Machchhar, being hailed as a hero for foiling an attempt by his co-pilot to crash an Israel-bound flydubai flight, has said he did not want to go down without a fight and so put in all he had to open the cockpit door from the inside.
“It began as a normal flight. The co-pilot wanted to pray, which a lot of locals do and which is not out of the ordinary. While he was praying, out of respect, I was just looking at the front and not at the back,” Machchhar told Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a phone call on Saturday.
“Suddenly, after I think I would say about four or five minutes, there was a big blow to the back of my head. My first thought was that there was a catastrophic damage to the aircraft and something is not right,” he said.
“But then the blows kept coming one after the other. And that’s when I realized that it’s not the aircraft, it’s the other guy who was in the cockpit with me.”
Machchhar said he tried to stop the co-pilot, but because of the initial blows, his vision was blurred.
“At that point the next thought, the next feeling that I had was that the aircraft was sharply going down. My memory is still in bits and pieces right now. But this is what I remember out of that time.
“I did try and manage to open the door once but I think he shut it back closed. At this point I remember I was lying down on the cockpit floor and I felt the aircraft and the whooshing sound and people screaming.
“I had that one last fight left in me. Call it personal or call it for the people, but I thought that if I don’t do it, I am going to die. And that is when I pushed against everything. I gave everything that I had and just went for the door and opened the door. And thankfully, people were waiting to pounce back, took over the control,” he said.
The cockpit door has a twist (knob) from the inside, the pilot said.
“From the outside, it can only be opened with a code. My colleagues from outside were trying to punch in the code but the guy was not allowing to open the code,” he said.
“The only way to open the door was to reach (for) the knob to twist it open. It was a short quick twist but once I had my hands on the knob, I guess I twisted it and opened it,” Machchhar said.
An Omani citizen, Hamam al-Hammami, has been identified in media reports as the co-pilot who attacked Machchhar with a crash axe, an emergency tool normally kept in the cockpit.
