The Pilot Threat
October 5, 2026
On September 30th, the first officer on a FlyDubai 737 en route from Dubai to Tel Aviv attacked the captain with a cockpit crash axe. A panicked struggle followed as passengers and off-duty pilots rushed to the cockpit.
The first officer, Hamam al-Hammami, was subdued and the jet landed safely in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia — though not before it was pushed into a high-speed dive that tore away part of its tail. Nobody was killed. Injuries to the captain were serious but he’s expected to recover fully.
Al-Hammami’s exact intentions are uncertain. According to reports thus far, his most likely plan was to hijack the Boeing and fly it into a Tel Aviv skyscraper.
This was a close call. If the captain, 38 year-old Smith Machchhar, hadn’t managed to unlatch the cockpit door from inside, al-Hammami would have probably killed him and crashed the plane.
It later came to light that al-Hammami had been banned from commercial flying in his home country of Oman, apparently for espousing radical Islamist views. How FlyDubai, a large and successful carrier, managed to overlook this is a question that needs answering.
Goodness. It’s Germanwings all over again. Or EgyptAir flight 990. Or SilkAir 185. Air India 171. Malaysia 370. Sad but true, pilots have gone rogue and crashed airplanes before. That list is much too long. So long that, as shown recently in a Wall Street Journal article, suicidal pilots are becoming one of the biggest statistical threats to air safety. This is partly true because other causes of crashes have grown increasingly rare, but still it’s a bit frightening.
So how do we keep that list from growing?
Passing through aircrew security yesterday at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, the screeners were a little more tightly wound than usual. It took our crew a good half hour to get through, with our luggage enjoying lots of extra scrutiny. This kind of nervousness isn’t surprising, but neither is it logical. The weapon employed by al-Hammami wasn’t something he smuggled aboard; it was a piece of standard cockpit equipment. And heck, you can fashion a deadly weapon out of any number of innocuous things.
It’s not about hardware. It’s about the element of surprise. The danger was Hammami himself, not anything he was carrying. This was true of the others on that list above (and of the 9/11 hijackers as well).
We can, in the meantime, debate the merits of additional psychological screening. We also can, for what it’s worth, separate those acts committed in the name of religious or political beliefs from those motivated by mental illness — so much as those things are different. For the victims it hardy matters — murder is murder — but methods of detection might need to be developed separately.
At a certain point, however, there’s not a lot we can do. We’re forced to rely on a set of presumptions. It comes down to trust. The threat can never be zero, but it’s always going to be low — very low. I don’t want this to sound like an airline press release, but you can confidently presume that the people flying your plane are exactly what you want them to be: well-trained professionals for whom safety is their priority. As an airline pilot I do not leave for work wondering if one of my colleagues is going to kill me. I shouldn’t be expected to. And neither should passengers.
For someone like me, the most frustrating takeaway from this near-disaster is knowing that people around the world are getting on planes today and wondering, if only idly, if their pilots are potential mass-murderers. For the profession it’s about the biggest embarrassment we could suffer.
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19 Responses to “The Pilot Threat”
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I understand that the cabin crew tried to open the door first using the passcode but that the co-pilot kept resetting the door somehow. Maybe not allow that possibility of locking out the cabin crew? Certainly that also carries risks but I think I would rather err in that direction than the other.
If the flying public and the pilots want a day-in-day-out worry, they should consider bedbugs. The irony being, well, you know.
I’m sure the passengers were all thinking Why didn’t someone tell us about the name change to DieDubai.
What an oddly defeatist take on the possibility of further improvement. The rule about 2 people in the cockpit was one response to this threat; I don’t understand why other changes aren’t possible.
Now that broadband communication with aircraft has become a solved problem, the capability for remote video monitoring of the flight deck seems like one area for exploration. Probably somebody more knowledgeable than I could think of many others.
You didn’t mention the biggest threat – religious suicidal furries in the cockpit.
I recall that following 9/11, TSA kept taking your silverware kit from you as it had “a knife.” Back then, you made a compelling argument that, as the pilot, you could crash the plane with or without a knife.
That remains the truth today.
Agree with Chandelle on AI171. A few pretty sharp questions need answers before pilot suicide can be accepted as fact.
For many years, Patrick, I have relied on your dispassionate analyses of events in the airline industry. You never fail to deliver.
This incident’s outcome turned on the captain getting that cockpit door open. I am wondering if that measure needs to be so absolute now that there are risk factors on both sides of that door.
In Star Trek II, Khan hijacks a starship and attacks Enterprise but Kirk is able to use a security code to override the other ship’s command console and remotely drop their shields. Maybe, something like that might be possible?
Thanks. Agree 100%
Still waiting for an article with your impressions of flying Boeing vs. Airbus!
I’m a tad disappointed to see AI171 in your list. AFAIK, the jury is out on that one
What’s most puzzling for me is that the co-pilot is an Omani. Anyone with a smidgen of familiarity with the Middle East would readily concur that Omanis are generally the most amiable, tolerant, and least religiously radical of the Arabs.
If there is a disabled pilot in a general aviation aircraft equipped with Garmin auto land you just
punch a button. Automation can land a plane and a lot of work is going on to automate AAM
aircraft for eventual use with remote pilots supervising multiple planes or fully autonomous operations.
If the two pilots in the cockpit were fighting I’d rather someone turn it over to automation for an
immediate landing something the pilot unions and airlines would probably never accept.
And pilots don’t want to be filmed but automation could detect a fight in the cockpit and take
over. Beats having more than 200 people die for no reason. Dave Hughes freelance aerospace journalist
“…suicidal pilots are becoming one of the biggest statistical threats to air safety.”
Indeed! When I started flying (mid-1950s), the two principal threats were mechanical trouble (especially if on a Boeing Stratocruiser) and in-cockpit human failure. Now…
As I alluded in another comment, the problem is essentially one of political correctness. Until governments and aviation authorities come to grips with the fact that the world has (in the infamous words of Bill O’Reilly) “a Muslim problem,” the threat of a pilot intentionally crashing a flight is higher than acceptable.
As often noted, it takes many people to put a plane in the air, but only one to bring it down. That nearly happened with FlyDubai, and I daresay we will be hearing about more such actions triggered by an Islamic nut job. That opinion is not Islamphobia (or whatever appellation du jour you prefer), merely a reality check.
Albeit not without significant added cost, perhaps it is time to consider adding a third person back to the cockpit… Perhaps a pilot in training to maximize efficiency?
“It’s not about hardware. It’s about the element of surprise,” sez Patrick the Pilot.
I was surprised the other day when the hardware (that would be the plane) arrived at Atlanta intact, on time, and ready for me to connect. Like Fantasy Island. Solved.
The Israeli plumber that straightened the nose I wonder if he’d have been able to do that at night.
Imagine going from the mindset involved in the routine and methodical actions of pre-flight of an airliner, getting clearances and signing off on documents, taking off to cruise, then trying to murder your partner with an axe and then the rest of the souls-on-board.
I recall decades ago reading a review of the movie The Exorcist that pointed out one reason it was so terrifying is that for the first time (not true — Hitchcock was there before) the evil was not coming from an outside entity but from inside ourselves. How do you combat something like that? This pilots-going-suicidal trope is that problem 100x worse and on top of that in reality rather than fiction.
Personally I can think of nothing to offer other than what is obvious.
I wonder if the answer is to re-examine the policy of pilots locking themselves into the cockpit with no one else aboard able to open the door, regardless of circumstances. Yes, that policy arguably diminishes the odds of a “successful” hijacking, but one could also claim that the suicidal intentions of the 9/11 hijackers already have made hijacking obsolete, since everyone on board will assume a suicide mission and react like white blood cells obliterating a virus.
I’m not asserting that the locked door policy is a net problem, but do think it has created a situation where a single person can commandeer a plane. Perhaps the flight purser and air marshall (if on that flight) should have the ability to open the cockpit door. Not sure how that would be implemented, but I’m not paid the big bucks.
You can never take away the fact that there will always be a strong element of trust in aviation. You can do all the background checks in the world but at the end of the day everyone from the authorities to the passengers just have to trust that the 2 individuals locked together in the cockpit will do the right thing. There is no way around that