- October 3, 2026
- 12:15 pm
- Middle East
Three days ago, it all started with an almost incredible story about the sudden fall of a Flydubai plane, a possible hijacking code, an injured captain, and an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. Now the UAE authorities officially speak of an attempted terrorist act. Pavel Shveyko gathered what has become known over these days about the person who was in the co-pilot’s seat — and discovered a question that is becoming almost more important than the attack itself: why was he even allowed back into the cockpit of a passenger plane.
Author: Pavel Shveyko
On September 30, 2026, Flydubai flight FZ1073 departed from Dubai to Tel Aviv as a regular passenger flight. On board were more than 170 passengers and crew members, most of whom were Israelis. Somewhere over Saudi Arabia, the routine flight ended: the plane suddenly went down, communication with the cockpit became problematic, and the situation escalated to a signal of possible unlawful interference.
Initially, the information was contradictory. There were talks of a fight between pilots, a knife, an attempted hijacking, and even a medical incident. On the same day, NANovosti detailed the events of the flight and noted separately: too much was still based on passenger accounts and initial leaks, and there was no official explanation. 174 people over Saudi Arabia: what happened on the Flydubai flight to Tel Aviv
Now this uncertainty has significantly decreased.
The UAE has officially called the incident an attempted terrorist act for the first time.
On October 3, the Attorney General of the United Arab Emirates, Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, announced through the state agency WAM that the investigation results indicate an attempted terrorist act on board FZ1073.
According to the investigation, the co-pilot attacked the aircraft commander inside the cockpit with an emergency crash axe, after which he attempted to seize control of the plane. Such an axe is a standard emergency tool in the cockpit and is intended for entirely different situations — for example, for crew actions after an accident or when access to damaged structural elements is needed.
This is an important clarification. Initial reports mostly mentioned a knife, but now the UAE authorities specify the exact weapon used in the attack and directly qualify the episode as terrorist. Reuters emphasizes that the prosecutor general’s statement is the first instance where the Emirati authorities themselves used such terminology.
Meanwhile, the investigation is not complete. The prosecution is studying the circumstances of the attack, the motive, possible connections of the suspect, physical and digital evidence. And this distinction is crucial: the attempted terrorist act is already the official version of the investigation, but who was behind it, whether the attacker acted alone, and what his ultimate plan was, is not yet publicly established.
Hamam Al-Hammami: who was in the co-pilot’s seat
American and Arab media identified the suspect as 29-year-old Omani citizen Hamam Al-Hammami. CNN, citing several sources, reports that he was born in the UAE to an Omani father and a Syrian mother and spent a significant part of his life in the Emirates. His name was also mentioned by Israeli officials and Saudi state media.
He had a completely normal external biography for a professional pilot. According to a LinkedIn profile, which was deleted after the incident and whose authenticity was confirmed by a CNN source, Al-Hammami was associated with Oman Air for about seven years — from February 2018 to February 2025.
He also received education in aviation management. Buckinghamshire New University in the UK confirmed to CNN that a person with that name completed a three-year distance program and received a degree in aviation management in 2023.
On paper, we are not dealing with a random person who ended up in the cockpit. This is a pilot with many years of experience in the aviation industry.
And this is where the most unpleasant part of this story begins.
Oman Air noticed the alarm back in 2024
According to ABC News, citing senior intelligence and law enforcement officials, problems arose during Al-Hammami’s time at Oman Air.
In 2024, he allegedly was found with extremist materials. After this, he was considered a security risk, removed from flights, and transferred to administrative work. That is, the company did not necessarily fire him immediately but did the main thing for aviation safety — removed him from the cockpit.
CNN received very similar information from its sources. One of the channel’s interlocutors reported that Al-Hammami was removed from flight training precisely because of concerns related to his radical views and was transferred to another position at Oman Air.
At this point, the story ceases to be just the story of one person.
Because after some time, he was back at the controls of a passenger Boeing.
Between Oman and Dubai, there was also Morocco
The deleted LinkedIn of Al-Hammami contains another interesting line: after Oman Air, he allegedly moved to Royal Air Maroc and held the position of Senior First Officer from June 2025 to January 2026.
But the Moroccan airline itself describes this period differently.
According to Moroccan Le Desk, Royal Air Maroc confirmed that Al-Hammami was indeed in training with them, but claims that he only completed about three months of theoretical training and did not perform any flights for the airline.
The difference is significant. It’s one thing to work as an experienced co-pilot for eight months, as the resume suggested, and quite another to go through a limited training phase and not be allowed to commercial flights.
After Morocco, Al-Hammami ended up at Flydubai. An Israeli official told CNN that by the time of the attack, he had been working there for about eight months.
It turns out to be a strange sequence: Oman Air removes him from flights amid concerns about extremist views; in Royal Air Maroc, according to the company’s version, he does not reach real flights; then Flydubai allows him to operate aircraft — including on the route to Israel.
NANovosti — News of Israel | Nikk.Agency is now dealing not only with the actions of one pilot. We are facing a possible failure of the international system for exchanging information about risks within civil aviation.
There is still no answer as to whether Flydubai knew about Oman Air’s decision. It is also unknown whether the information about Al-Hammami’s removal was passed on to the UAE authorities, subsequent employers, or international aviation structures.
ABC writes directly that investigators are now trying to understand how a person previously recognized as a potential security risk was able to regain the right to fly and become the first officer on a flight to Israel.
The Israeli route makes the question even sharper
For the Israeli reader, another context is necessary here. Oman, of which Al-Hammami is a citizen, does not have full diplomatic relations with Israel. This in itself does not automatically prohibit an Omani citizen from working on a flight of an Emirati airline, but it makes the question of crew verification especially sensitive.
Flydubai is a UAE airline, and since 2020, there have been diplomatic relations and direct air communication between Israel and the Emirates. The Dubai — Tel Aviv route has become routine and massive for Israelis over these years. Therefore, a passenger boards a plane in Dubai, usually without thinking about which country issued the co-pilot’s passport.
Now security services need to understand whether the existing information about this particular person’s biography should have stopped him much earlier.
NANovosti has already written about why Israel is able to maintain civil air communication even during periods of war and missile threats: such a system relies not only on air defense but also on a huge number of invisible procedures — intelligence information, crew checks, protected routes, and airline interaction with the state. Sky during war: why Israel flies, and Ukraine closed aviation for years
The FZ1073 story shows another side of this system: sometimes the threat may not be what approaches the plane from outside.
What was found in deleted accounts
After Al-Hammami’s identity was established, journalists began to study his digital footprint. And it added new questions to the investigation.
CNN analyzed about three thousand deleted posts on Twitter/X made in 2021–2022. In them, Al-Hammami demonstrated extremely conservative religious views: he wrote, for example, about requiring his future wife to wear a niqab and quit work after marriage, opposed men and women working together.
It is important to separate things. Radically conservative or misogynistic views in themselves are not proof of preparing a terrorist act and do not prove affiliation with a terrorist organization.
But the digital trail does not end there.
About nine hours after the incident, two posts appeared on a LinkedIn profile in Al-Hammami’s name. CNN emphasizes that it is not yet known whether the suspect himself posted them after the attack, whether someone else managed the account, or whether the posts were scheduled in advance.
One of the videos contained footage from the cockpit of a Boeing 737 MAX, images of Israeli planes, including El Al, and ended with photos of former Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi — a suicide bomber who carried out an attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan in 2009.
The second post used an AI-generated image of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, accompanied by text about rejecting humiliation, dignity, and lack of fear of death. Similar posts appeared on Instagram, after which the accounts disappeared.
This is why the UAE prosecutor’s statement about checking digital evidence and possible connections now looks especially important.
However, there is no public evidence that Al-Hammami was a member of Al-Qaeda, ISIS, or any other terrorist organization at this time.
What happened in the cockpit
According to the official UAE version, Al-Hammami struck the captain with an emergency axe and attempted to seize control.
The aircraft commander was Indian pilot Smith Machhar. During the struggle, the plane rapidly lost altitude. According to Flightradar24 data cited by Reuters, FZ1073 descended approximately 16,625 feet — more than five kilometers — in just over 30 seconds.
For a passenger airliner, such dynamics turn what is happening in the cabin from an abstract “emergency situation” into a physically tangible catastrophe that has already begun to unfold.
The crew and people on board managed to stop the attacker. Another circumstance played a special role: other Flydubai pilots were on the flight as passengers for subsequent work. One of the reserve pilots was able to take a seat in the cockpit and help regain control of the plane.
FZ1073 eventually made an emergency landing in Tabuk in northwestern Saudi Arabia. There, Al-Hammami was detained by Saudi authorities, after which he was handed over to the UAE for investigation.
For Israel, at that moment, the situation looked different: it was about a plane heading to Tel Aviv, with signs of a possible hijacking. Israel scrambled fighters and prepared for an emergency scenario even before it became clear that the plane would land in Saudi Arabia. NANovosti collected the first chronology of this reaction on the day of the incident. Israel scrambled fighters due to Flydubai plane with 174 passengers
Did he want to crash the plane over Israel
In the last day, another formulation has appeared: allegedly Al-Hammami has already confessed to the investigation that he intended to crash the plane over Israel.
It looks plausible against the backdrop of everything else — the flight was indeed heading to Tel Aviv, the co-pilot attacked the captain, tried to gain control, and the plane was rapidly descending. Some media also report, citing sources, that the investigation is considering the version of an intentional attempt to destroy the plane.
But at the time of publication, NANovosti did not find confirmation of exactly a confession in the official statement of the UAE prosecutor’s office, Reuters, ABC News, or CNN.
The Emirati prosecutor general reported an attempted terrorist act, an axe attack, and an attempt to seize control. At the same time, he emphasized that the exact motives and possible connections are still being investigated.
Therefore, turning the phrase “he confessed that he wanted to crash the plane over Israel” into an established fact is premature.
There is also a statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He said that, according to Israel’s information, the co-pilot was subjected to radical Islamist indoctrination and appeared to be a person with suicidal intentions. But at that time, Netanyahu himself noted that the final motive had not yet been established; now Israel is involved in checking the suspect’s possible connections. Reuters reports that Israeli investigators are expected to participate in the investigation alongside the Emirati side.
This is an important boundary between what is already known and what is still being clarified.
The main question now is not about the axe
The most obvious part of this story is the attack in the cockpit. Much is already clear there: there was an emergency axe, the captain was injured, there was an attempt to gain control, there was a sharp descent, there was an emergency landing, and the UAE authorities now officially call the incident an attempted terrorist act.
It is much more difficult to explain the preceding two years.
If the information from ABC and CNN is ultimately confirmed, as early as 2024, a professional aviation structure already saw the problem. The person was checked, extremist materials were found, and it was decided that he should not be at the controls of an aircraft.
The system worked in one place.
And then this same person went through another company, came to Flydubai, and was back in the cockpit. And not on a conditional domestic flight, but on a regular route to Tel Aviv — a direction that, for obvious reasons, is politically and terroristically sensitive.
And here the question is no longer just about Hamam Al-Hammami.
Who knew about his past? Who should have known? Did Oman Air pass the information further? What did Flydubai see during the new pilot’s check? What did they not see? And is there even a mechanism that guarantees that a person removed from flights by one airline due to extremist concerns will not end up in the cockpit of another a year later?
There are no answers to these questions yet.
But after the UAE prosecutor general’s statement, the previous version of the “unclear pilot fight” is definitively in the past. An attempted terrorist act occurred on the Dubai — Tel Aviv flight — this is how the state, where Flydubai is based, now officially qualifies the events.
And the coincidence may lie in something else entirely: there were people on the plane who managed to stop the attacker and land the airliner before investigators would have to deal with not just an attempt, but a catastrophe.