Tel Aviv: A fight between pilots on a commercial plane travelling from the United Arab Emirates to Israel forced the aircraft to make an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia 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 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.
It wasn’t immediately clear what caused the fight, the official said.
“The crew have been questioned as part of the investigation,” the regional official added, but did not say if anyone had been detained.
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.
A third official confirmed that Israel had scrambled warplanes, fearing a hijacking. All three officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the incident was still under investigation.
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.
Passengers told Israel’s Channel 12 by phone that they heard shouts from those sitting more forward on the plane who heard the 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 am local time, before landing safely at 9:45 am local time.
FlyDubai confirmed that flight FZ 1073 en route to Ben Gurion Airport experienced an incident and landed in Tabuk 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 normalised ties in 2020.
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