The FlyDubai flight to Tel Aviv is a modern story of Jewish heroism
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(RNS) — Some summer night years from now, a counselor at a Jewish summer camp will gather the kids around the fire and tell them a story.
He will hold up a pair of cheap airline headphones and start from there with a story about a man with a knife and an airplane falling out of the sky.
Its heroes are ordinary Jews who unbuckled their seatbelts and went forward.
On Wednesday morning (Sept. 30), 180 passengers were aboard a FlyDubai flight on its way from Dubai to Tel Aviv, most of them Israelis heading home for Sukkot.
Two hours and 15 minutes into the trip, the Boeing 737 MAX pitched into a dive, dropping roughly 17,000 feet in under two minutes.
According to passengers, the Omani first officer turned on the captain, an Indian pilot named Smit Machchhar, and stabbed him. Machchhar, bleeding from his copilot’s knife, acted heroically and used his last bit of energy to unlock the cockpit door and let help in.
Tzvika Manes, an Israeli bank executive traveling with his family, pulled his young daughter from the lavatory and went forward to the cockpit to fight . Two other Israelis…
