OPINION: A Thanksgiving story

By Joan Janzen

Having just celebrated Thanksgiving, I’m reminded the occasion is not only about getting together with family and friends and eating a lot of good food. Although that is important, it’s also a time to be thankful.

Although there’s no shortage of negative news, the September 30th flight from Dubai to Israel landed with a miraculous ending and averted disaster. The lives of 174 passengers plus crew members were saved. Twenty-seven were children and over one hundred were Israeli travellers. It was a Thanksgiving story.

Captain Smit Machchhar said it was a normal flight for the first two hours when he suddenly felt a big blow to the back of his head. At first he thought there was damage to the aircraft, but then the blows continued and he realized they were coming from his co-pilot, who was attacking him with an emergency crash axe. He felt the aircraft going down sharply and heard screaming. The aircraft dropped 14,000 feet in 29 seconds, far exceeding the structural integrity of the airplane and causing the rudder to come off.

“I tried to stop him, but because of the blows my vision was almost gone. I was lying on the floor and had one last fight in me. With everything I had, I went to the cockpit door and opened it,” he recalled. The captain suffered a depressed skull fracture, where a fragment of his skull had been driven inward towards his brain. Yet his one selfless act enabled passengers on the plane to continue the rescue.

Later, the co-pilot told investigators he intended to kill the pilot and crash the plane. More importantly, he wasn’t cleared to fly into Israel.

A 50-year-old plumber had been sitting with his wife and young daughter near the front of the plane. He pushed in the door to the cockpit. “I grabbed the attacker, put him in a chokehold, pulled him out and jumped back in and pulled the controls,” he said. The latter was a move he had seen from watching air crash investigation shows. Meanwhile, his young daughter watched and yelled, “Don’t die, Daddy!”

Two passengers helped remove the pilot and another passenger tied up the attacker with headphone cables. The co-pilot, who had been willing to die to carry out his mission, was asking his captors to kill him.

A dentist who was on a return trip from China rushed forward when he heard the shouting. He worked on the pilot to stop the bleeding and stabilize his blood pressure.

A passenger named Tal was seated close to the front and saw the struggle. “I realized there was no one in the cockpit. When I boarded the flight I noticed there’s two off-duty pilots next to me wearing uniforms. My first reaction was to urge them to go to the cockpit,” he reported. “They had to jump over the bodies of the pilots in order to get in.” They diverted the aircraft to an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.

“Someone stood up and said, ‘We are in charge of the aircraft,’” he recalled. Usually the policy in an emergency is that the crew manages the situation. “But the crew members were in shock and didn’t function. So we had to take control,” he noted. The passengers also weren’t sure if any crew members were collaborating with the co-pilot.

A passenger named Ahmad said most of the people remained seated, stayed calm and didn’t panic. “Just while the airplane was dropping people were screaming, but for a very short time. When the plane was stabilized people were relaxed,” he recalled. With 27 young children on board, that is another miracle.

Every passenger had a role. One communicated with Israel’s security services. Another provided a mobile hotspot and shared it with others. One passenger passed along headphone cords to secure the attacker. Passengers kept track of where they were using GPS maps, and one woman was reciting Psalms.

Initially, media worldwide reported the incident as an altercation between two pilots. Journalist Ben Mulroney said four words were noticeably absent in the news reports: terror, stabbing and Israeli passengers.

Nevertheless, passengers rushed forward, putting their lives at risk for the safety of others. Having a medical professional, two off-duty pilots and a courageous plumber on board to assist a heroic but wounded pilot were not minor coincidences.

One of the passengers summed up the flight well when he said, “I think it is a very big miracle made out of many small miracles.” For those of us who believe in divine intervention and power, that’s probably the only explanation that makes sense.

It’s a Thanksgiving story that demonstrates the resilience of the Israeli people and humanity working together across borders.

Joan Janzen