Since September 11, 2001, I have concurred with the commonly held view that the tactics the perpetrators used on that day became obsolete the moment that Flight 93 hit the ground. Never again, I assumed, would passengers on a commercial flight believe that their hijackers intended to land the plane safely, and, in consequence, never again would terrorists try that particular move. What happened on Flight FZ1073 yesterday illustrates that I was at least half-wrong in this assessment.
Per the Israeli defense minister, Flight FZ1073, on its way from Dubai to Tel Aviv, was the target of an “attempted jihadist terror attack.” The details are still coming in, but it seems that one of the pilots tried to stab another of the pilots, with the intention of crashing the plane — perhaps even into something — and killing everyone on board. The BBC quotes a passenger who reports that, when this happened, the aircraft dropped nearly 15,000 feet in a matter of minutes, causing “terrible screams throughout.” In response, “three to five guys burst into the cockpit” and managed to subdue the attacker. Somehow, despite visible damage to the aircraft’s tail, a couple of other pilots on board managed to land the plane.
This ought to serve as a reminder that there is nothing new under the sun. Fanatics are fanatics, and they remain willing to entertain ideas that we non-fanatics wouldn’t consider in ten thousand years. We see commercial air travel as an efficient way of getting around; they see it as a potential weapon. If they could crash all the planes in the skies above the United States, or Israel, or anywhere else they believe to be full of their enemies, they would do it. September 11 was so jarring because it had never occurred to most of us that someone would deliberately fly an aircraft into a skyscraper, or the Pentagon, or the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Today, that seems like a possibility. This has made our worldview darker, but it has probably also made it more accurate. In a competition between a bull and a china shop, the presumptive advantage must go to the bull.
There will be a host of questions to answer. How did the co-pilot pass the security screenings that exist to weed out this sort of thing? How did he get a weapon onto the plane (some reports say he had a knife, others an axe)? How did the passengers and stewards get into the cockpit, which, in most circumstances, is supposed to be secure? What was the target? The Israeli equivalent of the Pentagon is a skyscraper. One does not need an overactive imagination to consider how badly this could have turned out.
How near to success did the villains get in this case? One must assume that it was a close-run thing. Planes that drop 15,000 feet do not usually have too much more room to fall. Aircraft that exceed their maximum operating limit by 100 or more knots do not usually stay in one piece. And how often, on a commercial flight, are there enough spare pilots onboard to refill an emptied-out cockpit? The blunt truth is that this could all have gone very differently, and if it had, we would be looking at a different world this morning. In addition to the loss of life, the consequences of a successful attack inside Israel would have been geopolitically deleterious, and could even have led to the dissolution of the Abraham Accords. On their replacement flight home, the the passengers of Flight FZ1073 sang aloud, “And the main thing is—not to be afraid at all.” Crisis averted, for now.