Last month, during a production meeting for the Canadian documentary television series “Air Crash Investigation,” cellphones started to buzz with text messages and e-mails. All contained variations of the same headline: passengers and crew on FlyDubai Flight 1073, which was carrying more than a hundred and seventy people from Dubai to Tel Aviv, had foiled an attempted hijacking. The plane’s first officer, an Omani man named Hamam al-Hammami, had assaulted the plane’s Indian captain with an emergency axe and steered the aircraft into a nosedive. But as he attempted to crash the plane, the blood-soaked captain, Smit Machchhar, managed to unlock the cockpit door, allowing crew and passengers to pull Hammami away from the controls and subdue him. By then, the plane had plunged fourteen thousand feet in just twenty-nine seconds, according to data from Flightradar24, an aviation-tracking firm. Amid the free fall, Yaniv Hayun, an Israeli who had helped rush the cockpit, happened to be the first to grab the jet’s steering control, known as the yoke, and pulled back on it hard, helping stabilize the plane before two off-duty pilots travelling as passengers took over and landed the damaged plane safely in Saudi Arabia.
After the plane touched down, Hayun was widely credited with helping to prevent a mass-casualty event. But Hayun is a plumber from a small city south of Tel Aviv, and he had no prior experience in a cockpit. What spurred him to take control of the plane? His decision, he later told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, stemmed from watching “Air Crash Investigation.” “We were all just looking at each other, sort of thinking, ‘Can you believe what’s happening here?’ ” Alex Bystram, the show’s executive producer, who was at the production meeting, told me. “The guy who helped save this plane says he learned to do it from watching our show.”
Hayun, who is fifty years old and specializes in sewage pumping, is part of a global subculture that is fascinated with airline disasters. There are scores of websites, social-media groups, and YouTube channels dedicated to analyzing and documenting crashes, ostensibly with the goal of preventing future mishaps in flight. Among the most popular is “Air Crash Investigation,” also known as “Mayday,” which was launched in 2003 and is now in its twenty-seventh season, with broadcasting deals in around a hundred and fifty countries. Over the course of its multi-decade run, it has simulated and dissected more than two hundred and fifty airline disasters around the world. The show’s YouTube channel has more than a million devoted followers from all walks of life, and a Reddit community group counts tens of thousands of self-described “Mayday/A.C.I. fanatics.”
When Sam Becker, an admin of an “A.C.I.” Facebook group with twenty-seven thousand members, heard Hayun credit the show, he immediately imagined himself on the hijacked plane. “The first thing I thought of is that sounds exactly like what everybody on the ‘A.C.I.’ subreddit would say, that they would be willing or that they would be able to pull a plane out of a dive,” Becker, who is twenty-nine, told me. “My second thought was, I bet I could have probably done that, too.”
By all accounts, the passengers on FlyDubai Flight 1073 narrowly avoided disaster. Even before the plane took off from Dubai International Airport, major security failures had already taken place. Hammami, the flight’s twenty-nine-year-old co-pilot, had not been properly vetted. Two years earlier, his prior employer, Oman Air, had found online posts and a browsing history that suggested he had extremist views. The carrier banned him from flying, sent him to a deradicalization program, and gave him a desk job. Later, in 2025, he was selected for a preëmployment training program at Morocco’s national airline, before getting hired by FlyDubai, which is owned and operated by the Emirati government, and only screened him for prior criminal convictions, failing to look for any history of radicalization. Inside the plane, Hammami seized advantage of an airline-safety rule enacted after September 11, 2001, which mandated that pilots must be able to lock the cockpit from the inside to prevent hijackings or other external threats to the plane. The plane fell, “like a massive turbulence, like a massive g-force, for twenty or thirty seconds,” one passenger said. If Machchhar, although gravely wounded from Hammami’s attack, hadn’t unlocked the cockpit door, and if the courageous passengers, crew members, and off-duty pilots hadn’t taken action to stop Hammami, the Israel-bound plane would likely have crashed, almost certainly killing everyone on board just days before the country was set to commemorate the third anniversary of the October 7th attacks. The Emirati attorney general on Friday said Hammami, inspired by the 9/11 attacks, intended to crash the aircraft into the passenger terminal at Ben Gurion “with the aim of causing the greatest possible loss of life.”
Even after Hammami was tied up (passengers used headphone cords and plastic zip ties), the passengers and crew were in danger. The nosedive was so swift that a large part of the plane’s rudder was ripped off the tail. Aviation experts were surprised the plane didn’t completely come apart. “Once the airplane is descending like that, faster and faster and faster, it’s gaining more and more inertia,” Jeff Guzzetti, a former N.T.S.B. air-safety investigator, told me. “And at some point it’s just impossible to recover, to pull back smoothly on the yoke before you hit the ground, or to pull back and not separate the wings or the tail surfaces. You can structurally overload the airplane by making abrupt control movements at high velocities like that.” He added that it was “miraculous that they were able to get that assailant out of the cockpit and then recover the airplane after it had exceeded its maximum design airspeed.”
In an interview with Israel’s public broadcaster, KAN, Hayun said he learned from watching “A.C.I.” that “you have to pull the yokes when the plane’s nose is down.” When asked if he ever imagined doing this in real life, he replied, “No way! . . . I have never been in a cockpit.” He pulled the yokes “for a few seconds” and then said one of the off- duty -pilots took “control of the situation.” (Hayun did not respond to multiple interview requests.)
Did Hayun’s decision to pull back on the plane’s yoke make the difference? Guzzetti is skeptical. “Yes, it might have helped, but, I mean, it also could have hurt,” he said. “When you’re in an unusual altitude like that, heading down at such a high rate of speed, in such a dramatic fashion, could instinctively grabbing the yoke and pulling back have been a benefit? I don’t know. I find it a bit hard to believe.” Bystram, too, is unsure whether Hayun saved the day, but he believes his actions helped. “If nothing else, he gave the pilots behind him a little bit more time to get into that seat and figure out what was going on, take control of the airplane, and land it,” he said. “When a plane is heading towards the ground at ten thousand feet per minute, every second counts. And if this guy bought them a couple of seconds, then that was probably valuable.”
Shota Musaev, a dentist on the last leg of his return from a vacation in China with his wife, was among the passengers who rushed toward the cockpit. He told me that he spotted Machchhar covered in blood with severe cuts on his head and hands, and that he immediately began pressing on the wounds to stop the bleeding and monitored the pilot’s pulse. The situation was chaotic, he explained, so he didn’t see Hayun pull back the plane’s steering control, but he later spoke with Hayun, who told him he had helped stabilize the plane before the off-duty pilots entered the cockpit and took over. “I don’t know what would have happened if he touched nothing,” Musaev said. “I don’t know what would have happened without the help of Yaniv. We remember only parts of the moments. The plane’s black box will make all these moments clear.”
Becker, the Facebook-page admin, has watched the show since he was in middle school. He told me that he understands how Hayun could have gained confidence to try to stabilize the jet. “The show explains a lot of technical aspects of aviation and safety, but it does it in a very easily presentable way,” he said. “One of the consistent themes across, I’d say, most episodes are somebody pulls back on either the yoke or the side stick, which either causes a stall or solves the problem by not crashing into the ground.”
The backbone of each “A.C.I.” episode is the official investigation report of the mishap. “Essentially, we ask ourselves: Is there a good sort of lesson at the end of this for aviation?” Bystram said, explaining how the team decides which airplane incidents to investigate. “Is something going to change as a result, or did something change as a result? Or did this accident really shine a light on a glaring problem in aviation that no one really thought about before?” If the answer is yes, the episode is set in motion. A team of producers conducts interviews with people involved in the accident, while writers translate the highly technical investigative report for a general audience. Actors and computer-generated imagery are then used to dramatize the events that led to the accident and its aftermath. Much of the show is filmed in a Toronto studio equipped with a cockpit, a cabin, and a full air-traffic-control center. Actual pilots coach and guide actors to make sure their actions mimic real life. “It’s never just one thing that brings down an airplane,” Bystram said. “It takes a sequence of events, and it’s that sequence of events that we try to unravel and uncover throughout the course of a show.”
Among the show’s most popular episodes is “Kid in the Cockpit,” which reconstructs the Aeroflot Flight 593 disaster. During a flight from Moscow to Hong Kong in March, 1994, the pilot allowed his teen-age son to sit at the controls of the plane, and the boy unknowingly disengaged the autopilot. The plane went into a steep dive and crashed into the mountains of Siberia, killing all seventy-five people aboard. Another episode, called “Blow Out,” tells the story of British Airways Flight 5390, which saw its windscreen burst outward at seventeen thousand feet, sucking the pilot out of the plane and pinning him to the outside. Flight attendants rushed into the cockpit and held the captain by his ankles as the co-pilot struggled to control the plane. Incredibly, everyone on the plane, including the captain, survived.
As I watched episodes and read social-media posts from fans of “A.C.I.,” I started to reach out to more and more of the fans of the show, curious about why so many people around the world are fascinated with something as morbid as airline disasters. Many responded that, paradoxically, learning about the dangers of aviation made them less afraid to fly. One fan told me that it was “comforting to know what major safety rules are put in place after accidents happen,” and that as a result they “feel weirdly safer” when they fly. Others seemed interested in the investigative process, calling the show “ ‘C.S.I.’ for airline accidents.” But I also noticed several of the posts on the “A.C.I.” subreddit seemed to contain a tinge of jealousy. “So we’ve officially been brought into an actual aviation incident,” one commenter wrote, as another declared, “This guy has completed one of the Ultimate Bucket List challenges.” Another fan admitted, “Let’s not act like we haven’t all dreamed of this scenario!” while another read, “Amazing! My kids make fun of me for watching this show, but I just sent them this article saying that I might save a plane someday with my knowledge.”
Many of the fans in the Reddit group asked the obvious question: When is “A.C.I.” going to make an episode about FlyDubai Flight 1073? Some fans are already writing the script: “The first scene is a rendition of the hero watching A.C.I. like a crazy lunatic, and finally he gets his chance to prove all those hours of watching.” Another fan declared the episode would be “One of the GREATEST because it features one of us as the hero!!!” ♦