Air Jihad? Omani Pilot Tries to Crash Plane; Reportedly Was Islamic “Extremist”

The identity of the co-pilot who tried to violently take over a flydubai jet Wednesday hasn’t been released. Yet there’s now information indicating he was, as a source puts it, a “religious extremist.”

And, no, this doesn’t mean a Quaker or Anabaptist.

Many officials believe the Omani co-pilot, presumably a jihadist-minded Muslim, intended to crash the plane à la 9/11. The incident brings to mind, too, a 1999 affair in which a Muslim co-pilot purposely crashed an EgyptAir Boeing 767.

As for the current story, the New York Post reported Wednesday:

The pilot of a passenger plane flying to Israel was stabbed several times by his co-pilot in the cockpit early Wednesday, according to officials — causing the aircraft to plunge 18,000 feet in what was feared to be a “terrorist attack in mid-air.”

The FlyDubai Boeing 737 Max 8 plane flying to Tel Aviv from the United Arab Emirates was cruising at around 34,000 feet when one of the pilots tried to take control in what Israeli sources say was an attempted hijacking, the Jerusalem Post reported.

“One pilot stabbed the other and tried to do 9/11,” an official told Channel 12 of the horror that saw Israeli fighter jets scrambled as a precaution.

Some of the 174 passengers onboard [sic] also filmed horrific footage of one of the pilots covered in blood.

“We’re here during the hijacking of an airplane. At this point we’ve subdued the terrorists,” one passenger said, begging for help as blood ran down his head.

“We were either going to crash or be murdered,” another passenger told I24 News.

“It was like a terrorist attack in mid-air.”

Angels On Board

Along with the villainy, however, heroism was on display. The bleeding pilot, Smit Machchhar, bravely fought his Omani attacker and managed to open the cockpit door, allowing passengers to swarm in and subdue the co-pilot.

Then there was, commentator Andrea Widburg writes today,

Yaniv Hayun, a 50-year-old plumber traveling with his family. Hayun was the first to enter the cockpit and immediately grabbed the Omani co-pilot, dragging him out of the cockpit, where other passengers subdued him. (It’s very helpful when there’s a guarantee that a large percentage of the passengers have military training.)

With the airplane still plunging, Hayun grabbed the flight controls and pushed back on them, stopping the deadly descent. He’d never flown an airplane. He knew what to do because he liked Air Crash Investigation, a Canadian TV show …

Of such little things are miracles made.

By the time Hayun acted, the plane was apparently about three seconds away from an unstoppable crash. Thankfully, other pilots on board helped the plane land safely in Saudi Arabia.

… Meanwhile, the passengers quickly organized to save Machchhar, who was bleeding profusely.

This again illustrates, too, how good civilians, when ready, willing, and able, can and must often be the first and last line of defense against evil.

A Jihadist Connection?

As for the passengers’ theory about motive, it’s on the mark, according to a source cited by the Daily Mail. Per the paper on Wednesday:

A fellow pilot has also now claimed the assailant … was a religious extremist.

… [Channel 16’s] foreign editor and news anchor Yosef Yisrael described how he spoke to a colleague of the attacker, who wishes to remain anonymous.

… Mr Yisrael reads out how the violent pilot ‘was someone characterised by very strange behaviour, especially around religious observances that were out of step with his surroundings [at Flydubai]. For instance, he used to pray a lot, and would not shake hands with women’.

… ‘There is no other way to put it, we hired the services of a terrorist and nearly caused the deaths of 180 people,’ Mr Yisrael said the man told him. ‘Usually only Emiratis fly to Israel. It is not clear how he got on this flight.’

Moreover, it’s also not clear when listening to legacy media that a problem man even got on the flight. Just consider the reportage below.

Of course, had the perpetrator been a white supremacist, the story would be specific and everywhere.

(Actually, such a story would even more likely be in just one place: a fictional movie.)

Yet even writing “religious extremist,” as the Mail does, serves to muddy the waters. “Religion,” like “ideology,” is a category, not a creed. And just as Marxism is vastly different from libertarianism, the “religion” realm includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. Refusing to “shake hands with women” is not the hallmark of a Presbyterian. Rather, as has already been deduced, the Omani attacker was almost assuredly a jihadist-minded Muslim.

Not the Only Trouble in the Skies

As mentioned earlier, the flydubai incident is somewhat reminiscent of another event: the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded in that case that the tragedy was caused by Egyptian co-pilot Gameel Al-Batouti. It’s believed that Al-Batouti disconnected the autopilot, pushed the plane into a dive, and cut power to the engines while the captain was out of the cockpit. Al-Batouti could be heard on the black-box recording repeatedly saying in Arabic, “Tawkalt ala Allah” (“I rely on God”). The incident was not, however, labeled a terrorist act.

This said, it’s not just unhinged pilots that air travelers need worry about, but also industry incompetence. And why?

Because diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts under presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden dumbed down pilot and air-traffic-controller corps. Crashes have likely resulted from this social engineering, too.

And what this proves is that woke jihad can be every bit as deadly as Islamic jihad.