'Greatest Possible Loss of Life': Co-Pilot Confesses He Planned to Crash His Plane Into an Airport Terminal — Copying 9/11
In 60 seconds: UAE prosecutors revealed Friday that the flydubai co-pilot who attacked his captain on September 30 has confessed to a premeditated 9/11-style suicide plot: seize flight FZ1073 and crash it into the passenger terminal at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport.
- Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi said the 29-year-old Omani co-pilot confessed in his lawyer's presence, admitting his goal was "the greatest possible loss of life."
- Prosecutors say he drew inspiration from the September 11, 2001 attacks, flew the Tel Aviv route twice to study it, and cleared every professional and security check — nothing flagged him.
- On September 30 he attacked the Indian captain with the cockpit crash axe. The jet plunged 16,000 feet in 30 seconds before passengers and relief pilots overpowered him and diverted to Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Everyone on board survived.
- Investigators are still working to verify his claim that he acted alone.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the nightmare almost repeated itself — this time from inside the cockpit. The most chilling part isn't what the co-pilot tried to do. It's that, by every official account, he looked like exactly the kind of pilot you'd trust with your life.
Read our earlier coverage: "An Indian Prevented a 9/11-Style Tragedy": PM Modi Declares Captain Smit Machchhar a HERO and UAE Just Called the Flydubai Cockpit Attack Terrorism: Co-Pilot Used a Crash Axe.
What happened
On September 30, flydubai flight FZ1073 left Dubai for Tel Aviv with more than 170 people aboard. About two hours in, over Saudi airspace, the 29-year-old Omani co-pilot — identified by Reuters and the AP, citing people with knowledge of the case, as Hammam al-Hammami — attacked the captain with the cockpit's emergency crash axe. The jet plunged 16,000 feet in 30 seconds.
What saved everyone was chance layered on courage: a relief captain traveling as a passenger noticed the cockpit door opening and closing oddly, punched in the emergency access code, and stormed in with a crew member and several passengers. They freed the wounded captain, restrained the attacker, and the reserve crew landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Nobody died.
For a week the UAE said little about motive. That ended Friday, October 9, when Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi told the state news agency WAM this wasn't a breakdown or a grudge. It was a plan.
Latest verified facts
The confession is the centerpiece: the co-pilot admitted, in his lawyer's presence, that he "had begun carrying out a premeditated terrorist plot to seize control of the aircraft and use it to launch a suicide attack targeting the passenger terminal at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, with the aim of causing the greatest possible loss of life."
The preparation reads like a slow-burn horror story. Prosecutors say signs of extremism first appeared in 2017, when he was studying in Australia. He drew inspiration from the 9/11 attacks, consumed extremist material, and deliberately pursued an aviation career as part of his preparations — flying for Oman Air and Royal Air Maroc before joining flydubai in January 2026. He even used two earlier Tel Aviv flights to, in WAM's words, "familiarise himself with the flight route and the airport." Reconnaissance, in plain English.
And here's the part that should keep airline security chiefs up at night: flydubai's hiring screens caught nothing. Pilot's licence, certificate of good conduct — he met every requirement. "None of the procedures revealed any indications of his extremist views," Al Shamsi said. The wounded Indian captain survived. Flydubai had no immediate comment.
Why it matters
Every post-9/11 aviation security system assumes the threat comes from the cabin — locked cockpit doors, background checks, no-fly lists. All of it trusts the people in the front seats.
This case punches through that assumption. A vetted, licensed airline pilot allegedly spent years positioning himself for a suicide attack, and the system caught nothing. If the AG's account holds, it's the most serious insider-threat case in commercial aviation since Germanwings 9525 — and arguably worse, because this one was ideological, not psychological.
Impact on the USA and the world
A 9/11-inspired plot lands differently in America — it's personal here. But the practical impact is global. The Dubai–Tel Aviv corridor is a flagship of the Abraham Accords era; an attack there would have been geopolitical dynamite on top of mass murder. Expect cockpit procedures worldwide to face another hard look: the two-person rule, continuous crew vetting, and how airlines monitor the private lives of people with flight-deck access.
What happens next
Prosecutors are still verifying the co-pilot's claim that he acted alone, and no formal charges have been publicly announced. That lone-actor question is the big one: solo means a vetting failure; help means a network, and the hunt widens.
Our take: watch whether airlines quietly tighten crew screening in the coming weeks — the industry moves fast when it's scared, and it should be. The confession answers the "what." The "how did nobody see it for nine years" question is still wide open — and it's the one that matters most for the next flight you board.