Assets and Liabilities
Saving the Day on FlyDubai Flight 1073
Op-ed by Jack Carr on Fox News
The lesson from FlyDubai is simple. Be ready to save yourself
The knife attack over Saudi Arabia on the Dubai-to-Tel Aviv route could have killed everyone without passenger intervention
The events on FlyDubai Flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv on 30 September 2026 reads like something out of one of my thrillers. But what occurred in the skies over Saudi Arabia was not fiction, it was real world and highlights an adage I learned long ago and has been repeated in various incarnations across social channels with differing attributions over the years — hope is not a course of action, in most cases, no one is coming to save you, you will need to be your own cavalry.
That means be prepared.
I am actually surprised that this or something like this has not happened previously — an unhinged pilot or co-pilot killing the other, perhaps suicidal, perhaps in search of martyrdom, as what some terrorist organizations call an istishhadi or “martyrdom seeker.”
With prior planning it is possible for pilots to work together in a “martyrdom operation” that would be much harder to thwart. Or a single pilot or co-pilot could work with other “muscle” sitting in first class to prevent passengers from doing what they did on September 30, giving the terrorist in the cockpit time to kill them all or once again turn an airliner into a weapon focused on a specific target.
I think about scenarios like this every time I fly.
