' It went on like a normal day till it wasn’t,' Smit recalledMUMBAI: Two hours into the flight from Dubai to Tel Avivi, flydubai commander, Capt Smit Machchar was checking landing time and fuel figures on the computer when something struck hard at the back of his head. He thought part of his Boeing 737’s cockpit roof had broken loose.
Seconds later, as more blows rained in, he turned and saw it was his co-pilot. Bleeding, his vision shrunk to a few inches, he drifted in and out of consciousness during those fateful minutes when the aircraft went into a rapid descent, while the attack continued.
“There was a moment I told myself, Smit, do something, you can’t die like this,” said the flydubai pilot, recounting the Sept 30 terror attack on flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv, which was diverted and landed in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. The pilot said his memory of what followed is fragmented, a gap he is still working through with doctors and psychologists.
In his first extended account since the incident, given to Sky News Arabia on Sat evening, Machchar said an ordinary flight, with a co-pilot he was flying with for the first time, turned violent minutes after the man stood up to pray. It was a route he had flown many times.
An augmented crew was on board, and the relief captain was to take over operating duties after landing. “Normal flight,” he told the channel.
“It went on like a normal day till it wasn’t.” About two hours in, the relief captain had dropped by the cockpit to chat about rosters and flying hours when the co-pilot, who had stepped out for a toilet break, returned.
A few minutes into their conversation, he said he wished to pray and asked the relief captain to step out. Machchar said such requests are accepted in the region when the flight is stable.
The co-pilot asked the other Captain to step out, stood up behind him and began praying. “Out of respect, I did not look back.
I was checking the landing time and fuel figures on the computer, the routine background tasks of the monitoring pilot. Suddenly there was a very hard hit at the back of my head,” he said.
“It was something very strong and hard. I didn’t know at that point what had hit me.”
He fell forward, and his mind reached for training. “My first thought was, okay, something has broken from the aircraft roof, and it has been a catastrophic damage.
