The Indian captain who saved the day

At 34,000 feet over the desert on the morning of Wednesday 30 September 2026, flydubai flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv fell more than 14,000 feet in about 30 seconds.¹ In the cockpit the first officer had turned on the captain with a knife.

The captain was Smit Machchhar, a 737 commander from Mumbai. He was stabbed and slashed about the head and hands. He fought back, and with the attacker still trying to jam the aircraft’s equipment, he opened the cockpit door.² Passengers and off-duty flydubai crew came through it, wrestled the first officer down and tied him up with headphone cords. Off-duty flydubai pilots took the controls and landed at Tabuk, in north-western Saudi Arabia. All 180 people on board, 174 passengers and six crew, came down alive.³

“My salute to the Indian pilot Captain Smit Machchhar for his extraordinary bravery,” Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, wrote that evening. “Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker.” Mr Machchhar, he said, “saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals… He is a true hero.”⁴ In Delhi, Narendra Modi called him a hero and said “India is proud of Captain Machchhar”.⁵

How the flight unfolded

Times are GMT. Israel and Saudi Arabia were three hours ahead, Dubai four. The aircraft’s movements come from Flightradar24 data; what happened inside it comes from passengers, Israeli officials and the airline, and the official investigations have not yet reported.⁶

Time (GMT)	What happened
03:05	FZ1073, a Boeing 737 MAX 8, leaves Dubai for Tel Aviv with 174 passengers, 27 of them children, and six crew.
About 05:21	Cruising at 34,000 feet, the aircraft plunges more than 14,000 feet in about 30 seconds. In the cockpit the first officer, whom Israeli and US officials identify as an Omani citizen, has attacked the captain with what passengers describe as a pocketknife.
05:31	The transponder shows 7700, general emergency.
05:38	The code changes to 7500, unlawful interference: a hijacking. Israeli security sources say two air force jets are scrambled, and Mr Netanyahu holds emergency consultations.
Minutes later	Bleeding, the captain opens the cockpit door. Passengers, among them Yaniv Hayun, who says he “choked him”, pin the first officer and bind him with headphone cords and, by one account, zip ties. Off-duty flydubai pilots travelling on the flight take the controls. Dr Shota Musayev, an Israeli dentist on board, stops the captain’s bleeding; he later described the wounds as “practically sliced open”.
06:58	The aircraft lands at Tabuk. Both pilots go to hospital. Saudi investigators open an inquiry.
15:34	A replacement aircraft leaves Tabuk. The passengers reach Israel that evening.
Evening	Mr Netanyahu salutes Captain Machchhar on X. flydubai suspends all its flights to and from Israel.
1 October	The Indian embassy in Riyadh says the captain has had an operation and is stable. His parents fly from Mumbai to be with him.

flydubai has said only that “an altercation occurred in the flight deck” and that the motive is under investigation. Mr Netanyahu said it looked like a suicide attempt; Israel Katz, the defence minister, called it an attempted jihadist terror attack.⁷ Nobody has yet explained how a blade reached the cockpit of a flight to Tel Aviv.

The man in that cockpit grew up in Ghatkopar, in Mumbai, in a Gujarati family in the textile trade. He studied textile chemistry and business before training to fly in New Zealand, and had logged about 9,750 hours, more than 6,400 of them in command.⁸ On a podcast last year he talked about the people behind the cockpit door. “When things are going wrong,” he said of the cabin crew, “you need them.”⁹

The road from Haifa

Indians have fought for this stretch of coast before.

On 23 September 1918, in the last weeks of the First World War, the Jodhpur and Mysore Lancers of the 15th Imperial Service Cavalry Brigade were ordered to take Haifa from the Ottoman army. The town was held by machine guns and artillery on the slopes of Mount Carmel, with the Kishon river and its marshes in front. At about two in the afternoon the Jodhpurs charged straight at the guns with lances, while the Mysores swung round to come at the town from the east and north. By the end of the afternoon Haifa had fallen. The brigade lost eight men killed and 34 wounded, and took 1,350 German and Ottoman prisoners, 17 guns and 11 machine guns.¹⁰

Major Dalpat Singh of the Jodhpur Lancers, 26 years old, was cut down by machine-gun fire in the charge and awarded the Military Cross after his death. India remembers him as the Hero of Haifa. Captain Aman Singh Jodha took over and pressed the attack home.¹¹ The battle is counted among the last successful cavalry charges against a defended town.

Date	Haifa to now
23 September 1918	Jodhpur and Mysore Lancers take Haifa from the Ottoman army.
1918 onward	Forty-four Indian soldiers from the campaign are buried in the Indian war cemetery at Haifa.
Every 23 September	The Indian Army’s 61st Cavalry, heir to the state lancers, marks Haifa Day.
July 2017	Narendra Modi, the first Indian prime minister to visit Israel, goes to the Haifa cemetery with Mr Netanyahu and unveils a plaque to Major Dalpat Singh.
14 January 2018	Delhi’s Teen Murti Chowk, whose statues honour the three lancer regiments, is renamed Teen Murti Haifa Chowk, with Mr Netanyahu present.
2018	Israel Post issues the centenary stamp.
September 2025	Haifa’s schools rewrite their lessons. “It wasn’t the British but the Indians who liberated us,” says the mayor, Yona Yahav.
30 September 2026	Captain Smit Machchhar, stabbed in his cockpit on the way to Tel Aviv, opens the door that saves FZ1073.

The other story told about Indians

The praise from Jerusalem arrived in the middle of a hard year for Indians abroad, and especially in America. Open any social platform and a familiar set of claims is waiting: that Indians smell, that they are dirty, that their food is disgusting, that they cheat, that they are in the West to take jobs they did not earn. The slurs have become more open since the fight over H-1B visas began at the end of 2024, and they have spilled off the screen.

The Center for the Study of Organized Hate counted more than 542,000 anti-South Asian posts on X between January 2025 and June 2026. Monthly volume was up 240 per cent on January 2024, and posts calling Indians dirty or unsanitary rose 171 per cent.¹² On 20 September 2025, the day after President Trump put a $100,000 fee on new H-1B petitions, one slur for Indians was posted 1,773 times.¹³ A Carnegie Endowment survey found that a quarter of Indian Americans had been called a slur since the start of 2025, and half had faced discrimination in the past year.¹⁴

It has not stayed online. A councilman in Palm Bay, Florida, posted “Deport every Indian immediately” and was censured by his colleagues. In Dublin in July 2025, a newly arrived Indian tech worker was falsely accused, then beaten, stabbed and stripped in the street; the police said he had done nothing wrong. In Australia, flyers for anti-immigration marches that August warned of “more Indians in 5 years, than Greeks and Italians in 100”.¹⁵

The record says something else. Households headed by Indian Americans had a median income of about $151,000 in 2023, the highest of any Asian-origin group, and 77 per cent of Indian Americans over 25 hold a degree.¹⁶ They are about 1.5 per cent of the population and, by one estimate, pay 5 to 6 per cent of America’s income tax. Sixteen Fortune 500 companies had chief executives of Indian origin in 2023, among them Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai.¹⁷ Immigrants born in India founded or co-founded 96 of America’s billion-dollar start-ups, more than those from any other country.¹⁸ One in five immigrant doctors in the United States is Indian.¹⁹ And immigrants as a whole are about 60 per cent less likely to be locked up than people born in America.²⁰

Nobody should have to earn the right not to be dehumanised. The numbers only show how far the caricature sits from the people it describes. A man who is supposed to be unclean, dishonest and taking what is not his spent the worst minutes of his life holding a knifeman off the controls of a plane full of strangers.

The same rule runs the other way. Israeli and US officials say the attacker is Omani. One man with a knife says nothing about the people of Oman, just as a slur says nothing true about 1.4 billion Indians. People should be judged by what they do.

A force for good

Indians abroad are doctors in hospitals, engineers behind the software the West runs on, owners of the motels and corner shops on its highways, and pilots who fly its holiday jets. The diaspora is large enough now to answer contempt by being what it already is, and by saying so, loudly and in public, when the caricature is repeated. The lancers at Haifa and the captain over Tabuk acted when it was frightening to act, for people who were not their own.

Captain Machchhar is recovering in hospital in Tabuk, and his parents have flown out from Mumbai to be with him. The people who finished what he started deserve the paper’s thanks too. Yaniv Hayun and the passengers who came through the door held down a man with a knife. Dr Shota Musayev, an Israeli dentist, stopped the bleeding of a pilot he had never met. The off-duty flydubai pilots took the controls and put the aircraft down safely in the Saudi desert.

The first move was the captain’s. Stabbed, cut and fighting for the controls, he reached for the door and gave 174 passengers the chance to save themselves. Salute, Captain Machchhar.

Footnotes

1. Flightradar24 data, as reported by Ynet and Newsweek, 30 September 2026. Other readings of the same data give 14,125 feet in 29 seconds (NBC) and 33,000 to 17,000 feet in about a minute (AP). Confidence: reported. ↩

2. Benjamin Netanyahu, on X and in remarks reported by NBC News, 30 September 2026. Confidence: reported. ↩

3. Passenger and crew numbers from the Aviation Herald and Ynet. flydubai said the aircraft “was successfully secured by on-duty flydubai crew travelling on the flight, who diverted and landed the aircraft safely”. The headphone cords are from passengers interviewed by Ynet; the dentist also mentions zip ties. Confidence: reported. ↩

4. Benjamin Netanyahu on X, 30 September 2026. His figure of 174 is the passenger count. Confidence: verified. ↩

5. Gulf News, 1 October 2026. Confidence: reported. ↩

6. Flightradar24 data via AeroTime, Ynet and Newsweek; Times of Israel live blog, 30 September 2026, for the scrambled jets; NBC News for Yaniv Hayun; ABC News (Australia), 1 October 2026, for Dr Musayev and the embassy; Al Jazeera for the replacement flight; Gulf News for the suspension. The first officer’s name has not been released. Confidence: reported. ↩

7. NBC News and CBS News, 30 September 2026. No government in the region has stated a motive. Confidence: reported. ↩

8. Gulf News, “Who is Captain Smit Machchhar”, 1 October 2026; The Week (India), 30 September 2026. Confidence: reported. ↩

9. Bona-Fide Banter, hosted by Zalak Mehta, as quoted by ABC News (Australia). Confidence: reported. ↩

10. “Battle of Haifa (1918)”, Wikipedia, drawing on the official and regimental histories; The Verandah Club, “September 23, 1918: the day Indian cavalry conquered Haifa”. The Hyderabad Lancers, often said to have charged, were escorting prisoners that day. No reliable figure exists for Ottoman and German dead. Confidence: reported. ↩

11. “Dalpat Singh (soldier)”, Wikipedia; Organiser, 23 September 2023. Confidence: reported. ↩

12. Center for the Study of Organized Hate, report on anti-South Asian hate in the United States, 28 September 2026. Confidence: reported. ↩

13. Stop AAPI Hate and Moonshot, “Keeping count: anti-South Asian hate”, 4 November 2025. Confidence: reported. ↩

14. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, “Indian Americans in a time of turbulence: 2026 survey results”, February 2026. A YouGov poll of 1,000 Indian Americans. Confidence: verified. ↩

15. Office of Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, October 2025; TheJournal.ie, July 2025, and The Irish Times, 14 November 2025; ABC News (Australia), 27 September 2025. Confidence: reported. ↩

16. Pew Research Center, “Indian Americans: a survey data snapshot”, 6 August 2024, from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Confidence: verified. ↩

17. Indiaspora and BCG, Indiaspora Impact Report, September 2024. The tax share is the report’s modelled estimate. Confidence: estimated. ↩

18. National Foundation for American Policy, “Immigrants and US billion-dollar companies”, June 2026. Confidence: reported. ↩

19. New India Abroad, “One in five immigrant doctors in US is an Indian, study finds”: about 52,400 of 262,000 immigrant physicians. Confidence: reported. ↩

20. Abramitzky and others, “Law-abiding immigrants”, 2024, from US census data for 2020. The figure covers all immigrants; no current figure exists for Indians alone. Confidence: verified. ↩