Liron Shapira
@liron
Jesus, I've never seen an interview like this!
Watch the whole thing or at least read my notes:
1. Yaniv was sitting in Row 11, not Business Class. He heard a woman up front yelling “Stabbings!" (She didn't say who.) Yaniv immediately stands up to see what's going on.
2. Wife & daughters are sitting around him. Then the plane starts shaking. Plane rolls very sharply leftward and back to horizontal in a terrifying way.
3. It hits him that the commotion isn't a fight in Business Class, it's happening in the cockpit.
4. He yells “Buckle up!” and runs toward the cockpit. He's 6 feet away from the cockpit when the plane suddenly nosedives.
5. It felt like it nosedived for an eternity. (In reality about 30 seconds at 30,000ft/min, reaching speeds of about Mach 0.96. Those 30 seconds of nosediving cut the plane's altitude in half.)
6. “I was flying.” He was blown around upward, sideways, he was pressed against the floor extremely hard. (A 180lb man would effectively have 540lb of downward force on their body as the first nosedive leveled out.)
7. “I kept trying my hardest to get up off the ground. At some point, I was finally able to, when the plane leveled off a little.” He speculates that a system kicked in to automatically stabilize the plane.
8. He goes to the cockpit door and there's a crew member in a white shirt, who looks like he's also a pilot. He's grabbing the cockpit door with both hands, with his body leaning down. I didn't know if he was trying to open the door, or trying to hold the door closed!
9. “I get to him, I move him away, he doesn't resist. I open the cockpit door — it was a little difficult because the pilot was lying down on the floor behind it, the one who was attacked.”
10. “I went in. The terrorist was crouching with his knees on the instruments between the two pilots' seats. There was no one in the pilots' seats. He was hitting the instrument panel, trying to break the equipment.”
11. Yaniv yells “Come help!” to any other Israelis who are also in the aisle. He doesn't know how many there are because his back is to them.
12. Yaniv immediately grabs the terrorist by the throat and starts moving him away from the controls. The terrorist resisted, but Yaniv's struggle to get him out of the cockpit only took a few seconds.
13. A handful of men who'd already gotten up from their seats together with Yaniv were already standing in the aisle dividing up responsibilities among themselves. They take over subduing the terrorist.
14. Yaniv turns back to the cockpit controls. At this point, the plane isn't nosediving, but it's still angled downward. He looks out the windshield and sees ground in the distance.
14. He leans over the pilot's seat, grabs the yoke and pulls it upward. He feels the nose of the plane come up.
15. A few seconds later, a pilot (not an Israeli) comes up behind him and says “Release the controls, I'll take it.”
16. Yaniv wasn't sure whether the other pilot was trustworthy, but he said “ok” and let him sit down at the controls. He intended to supervise the new pilot.
17. Yaniv turns around and briefly helps the men who are dealing the terrorist blows to subdue him, since apparently the terrorist is still resisting. Eventually the terrorist stops resisting, he possibly gets knocked unconscious, and the men tie him up with headphone cables.
18. Yaniv also helps the men remove the wounded Indian pilot from the cockpit. Then he goes to close the cockpit door with himself and the replacement pilot inside.
19. At this point, a member of the flight crew arrives at the cockpit door and wants to come in. Yaniv asks the replacement pilot whether to let the crew member in. He says yes, he's with us.
20. The flight crew member comes in. He has a tablet with a map. Yaniv closes the cockpit door with the three of them inside. He latches it.
21. Now Yaniv is focused on checking that the replacement pilot and the crew member are acting properly to land the plane. He sees that the pilot is talking on the radio to ground control. It sounds good to Yaniv, even though he doesn't speak much English. Yaniv can tell he's reporting that there are injured people, that we're heading in a certain direction, and that he's requesting help.
22. Some of the other Israelis were assigned to guard the rest of the flight crew. At this point, they feared that the whole crew could be conspiring. This is why the entirety of the stressful incident was about 40 minutes long. They couldn't relax until they landed and the flight crew got off the plane.
23. When they landed, one of the Israelis on the plane bought eSIM cards with a data package for everyone. As soon as they get reception, he gets a bunch of messages with pictures of himself on international news.
24. The landing was an incredible celebration. Singing, what fun we were having.
25. Let's rewind. You wake up in the morning before getting on this flight. Did something prepare you for this engagement? Something in the army? Some instinct? “Well, in the army, I was working the closest to the fire in the kitchen. (I wasn't a cook, I'd, you know, get the food and divide it up.)”
26. Yaniv personally didn't feel scared to board the second FlyDubai flight they sent. What are the odds lightning would strike twice? “Even being in this situation once was like winning the lottery.”
27. Did FlyDubai offer some kind of compensation for the incident? Did they contact you at all? “Nothing.”
28. Will you fly again? “Fly again? Sure.”
29. When are you going back to work? “I want to on Sunday.”
What an interview. Makes me proud to be Israeli.
15 minutes
View: https://x.com/liron/status/2106530403741798644
