DUBAI—A central mystery of this week’s attempted downing of Fly Dubai Flight 1073 has been how the co-pilot managed to smuggle a weapon into the plane to carry out his attack. It turns out he didn’t. The weapon he used is a cockpit fixture. The plane’s captain said that during what was a normal flight his co-pilot asked to pray. “Suddenly…after about four-five minutes, there was a big blow to the back of my head,” Smit Machchhar told Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call posted by the Israeli leader’s office Saturday. United Arab Emirates authorities said earlier in the day that the co-pilot used the plane’s crash ax—a tool that regulators around the world require airplanes to carry—to attack his captain. Designed for use as an emergency tool to tear through metal in case of a fire or a crash, the crash ax instead became a weapon the co-pilot wielded to wound his captain and try to take over the controls of the Boeing 737 MAX 8 over Saudi Arabia.
The use of the ax highlights the tough trade-offs regulators face as they try to guard against competing threats to safety on planes. Those include reinforced cockpit doors designed to keep out dangerous passengers like those behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S., but which make it harder to stop internal threats like the Fly Dubai incident this week. The ax is required to be on board U.S. carriers as well as those in the U.A.E. But Wednesday’s attack likely will draw renewed scrutiny to the risks it poses, particularly in situations where the danger lies in the flight deck.
A statement Saturday from U.A.E. attorney general, Hamad Saif Al Shamsi, said the co-pilot “began executing his plan during the flight, attacking the captain inside the flight deck using a crash ax and attempting to take control of the aircraft’s flight controls.” Investigators are still trying to determine his motives. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that he is an Omani national named Hamam al-Hammami who had previously been banned from flying by Oman over concerns he had adopted radical ideological views.
Source: Wall Street Journal US Business · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing