The FlyDubai Incident Gets WORSE!? (Audio-Only Version)

Petter Hörnfeldt (0:06)

A very good afternoon to you, ladies and gentlemen, and very welcome to this special episode of Captains Speaking. Together with me, Petter Hörnfeldt, and as always.

Ben (0:14)

As always me, welcome everybody. Welcome back to the podcast, and more specifically, welcome back to the special update on the FlyDubai incident that happened recently, where we're going to be going through what we know so far. We're going to be talking specifically about what would need to be done to recover this very poorly aircraft after the passengers got in. We're going to be talking about flight deck door protocols and how the questions it raises now, now this instance has happened. What we know about the captain, from now he's had an interview.

What jump seating pilots had to do, once they, what were they faced with once they got into the flight deck, and then we're going to be discussing how this first officer got employed in the first place. So stay tuned for that. But Petter, do you want to just go through what we know so far?

Petter Hörnfeldt (0:55)

Yeah, for those of you who have not heard about this, first of all, you probably have been living under a rock because I have never seen so much media coverage of a non-lethal incident before in my life.

But anyway, this all took place last Wednesday, which was the 30th of September, happened to FlyDubai flight 1073, which is a Boeing 737 MAX 8 that was departing from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, heading for Tel Aviv in Israel, which is a big part of this story, with 174 passengers and six crew members on board. So this aircraft left the airport of Origen early in the morning, 7.05 in the morning, and it's climbed up to its cruising altitude, 32,000 feet initially, then 34,000 feet. It stayed there, everything was completely normal for the first two hours and 15 minutes. Just to put that into perspective, that this is a fairly short to medium-haul flight, like it's not a very long flight, and that will become interesting later on.

But anyway, at about two hours and 15 minutes, something happened, right? And we're starting now to get a clearer picture, but we have to also be very clear that none of this is coming, some of it is coming from official sources, but most of it are coming out of interviews from the people involved, right? And that's really important for you to understand because at the moment, we don't even know if there is a full Icao investigation taking place or if this is treated as a security event, in which case it might be under a crime investigation, which might be very different, right? So when it comes to us getting hold of the cockpit voice recorder, flight data recorder data, we just don't know when that is going to happen. But because this, what I'm about to tell you, didn't cause any death in the end, we can kind of speak of it a little bit more freely than what we would do if anyone had actually died from it. But what we do know is that the first officer attacked the captain. That has been made absolutely abundantly clear now. And after that, the aircraft went into a very serious descent. Initially, it did a little bit of a dip of about 1,000 feet, which was probably when the altercation started. And then this aircraft just dropped out of the sky. And there is ADSBA data out there saying that it descended about 16,000 feet in anything between 1 minute and 90 seconds. In any case, an incredible descent rate, during which the speed of the aircraft increased to well above the maximum speed that it's allowed to fly, possibly as high as 100 knots above.

And then after that, the aircraft did kind of level off. But that seemed to have been the effect of the captain being able, the Indian captain being able to open the door, which we'll get into later on. At which point the cockpit was stormed by passengers that were waiting outside, that had obviously heard something. And one of the passengers allegedly then pulled the aircraft out of the dive. We're also gonna be talking about that, because we're pretty sure that there's more to this story.

Anyway, after that, the first officer was removed. The captain was obviously severely injured. And the two jump-seating pilots that just happened to be on board, out of sheer serendipity and luck, sitting in the back of the aircrafts, managed to get up to the front of the aircrafts. They got in, and we're gonna get into great detail of what they faced, which is something that is just horrendous.