After subduing a knife-wielding assailant, he knew knew what to do because he watches TV
Let’s begin with the official story. In today’s AI-addled world, it’s easy to get concise summaries of official stories: Just ask AI. So Gemini: Did an Israeli plumber really pull an Emirati plane out of a suicide nosedive?
Gemini:
Yes, an off-duty Israeli plumber named Yaniv Hayun helped pull a Flydubai passenger flight out of a sharp dive after a mid-air cockpit attack. [1, 2]
What Happened
- The Incident: During a Flydubai flight traveling from Dubai to Tel Aviv, an in-flight altercation broke out in the cockpit. Officials stated that a pilot allegedly attacked the captain (identified as Smit Machchhar) with a knife, causing the aircraft to plunge rapidly thousands of feet. [1, 2, 3]
- The Intervention: The wounded captain managed to open the cockpit door and call for help. Yaniv Hayun, an Israeli passenger and plumber, rushed forward, put the attacker in a chokehold, and pulled him away from the controls. [1, 2, 3, 4]
- Pulling Up: Finding the cockpit momentarily vacant of functional control, Hayun grabbed the yoke and pulled back to help level the plane, later stating that watching aviation safety shows like Air Crash Investigation gave him a basic idea of what to do. [1, 2]
- The Resolution: Other passengers and off-duty pilots on board quickly stepped in to fully restrain the attacker and take over the aircraft. The flight safely diverted and made an emergency landing in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Wow. So it wasn’t just an Israeli plumber. It was an off-duty Israeli plumber! Good thing he was off-duty. Had he been hard at work unclogging the plane’s toilet, which he would have needed to do had it been as full of shit as this story, he would never have had the chance to heroically save the lives of 174 passengers by doing the unprecedented and near-impossible: Pulling the plane out of a suicide dive induced by a disgruntled pilot. (But at least he could have saved the toilet, and the passengers’ noses—as well as the noses of most of the world’s population, which are being tightly and unrelentingly squeezed to ward off the reek of this stinking story.)
Here is the plumber recounting his heroics to Bibi, who needs to work on his acting skills.
In the whole history of commercial aviation, there have been at least ten cases in which suicidal-homicidal pilots plunged their planes into steep high-speed nosedives. In all ten of those cases, the planes went splat and everyone died. Not once, before yesterday, had any commercial flight that had been put into a steep high-speed nosedive by a demented pilot EVER survived. Not once. The success rate for rescue efforts, even by other experienced pilots, is exactly 0%. Or was. After today, it is pushing 10%. The obvious lesson: In the name of aviation safety, every airline should offer a free first-class seat to a plumber who watches TV, just in case a knife-wielding suicidal pilot needs to be subdued after putting the plane into a steep nosedive, and the plane needs to be righted—a feat that pilots can’t accomplish, but TV-watching plumbers apparently can.
Even Donald Trump, who peddles the most atrociously ridiculous tall tales on a daily basis, had a hard time swallowing this one.
Here is Israeli TV footage of the passengers walking around the aisles during the steep high-speed nosedive:
Jackson Hinckle’s summary of the context has drawn two million views on X:
And the rest of X is melting down in helpless laughter.
There are still a great many questions swirling around this…er, questionable incident. But one question has been definitively answered:
