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Stabbed In His Own Cockpit, An Indian Pilot Gave Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam A Meaning

Edited by IndianRepublic.in - Location: Tabuk Saudi Arabia

Captain Smit Machchhar has been called a hero by the prime ministers of both India and Israel, after an attack on a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv

Captain Smit Machchhar has been called a hero by the prime ministers of both India and Israel
Image Source: @IsraelMFA
The captain of flydubai flight FZ1073 was an hour or so from Tel Aviv on Wednesday when, according to Israeli officials, his co-pilot drew a knife in the cockpit and stabbed him.

What Captain Smit Machchhar did next is why two prime ministers spent Wednesday night talking about an Indian pilot most of the world had never heard of. Bleeding, he fought back, and he got the cockpit door open. Passengers and off-duty crew forced their way in and overpowered the co-pilot. The aircraft, which had plunged thousands of feet, was brought under control and diverted to Tabuk in Saudi Arabia.

There were 174 people on board.

"Captain Smit Machchhar is a HERO," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wrote. "In the face of the gravest danger and despite being seriously injured, he showed immense courage and an unwavering resolve to protect the lives of others. His valour helped save hundreds of lives and avert a great tragedy."

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, posted within hours. "Despite being stabbed and seriously injured, he fought back, resisted, opened the cockpit door, and enabled passengers and crew to overpower the attacker, preventing a catastrophic mid-air disaster. He saved the lives of 174 people, including Israeli citizens and other nationals. He is a true hero."

Machchhar underwent surgery in Saudi Arabia and is in a stable condition. A dentist who was travelling on the flight and tended to him before the aircraft landed told CNN he had suffered massive blood loss. A few more moments, the dentist said, and they would have lost him.

He is 13 years into his career. He flew for SpiceJet in India for eleven of them, latterly as a line training captain teaching other pilots, and joined flydubai in 2022. He has logged more than 9,750 hours on Boeing 737s. He learned to fly in New Zealand, spending eighteen months at a flight school in Dunedin, where the chief executive remembered him on Wednesday as an above-average student and said he had written to wish him a recovery.

Consider who was in that cabin and who was in that cockpit. An Indian captain, trained in New Zealand, flying an Emirati aircraft from Dubai to Israel. A co-pilot from Oman. Passengers who were mostly Israeli. An emergency landing on Saudi soil, and the passengers flown on to Ben Gurion that evening by a replacement crew. A dentist in a passenger seat keeping an Indian stranger alive at thirty thousand feet while Israeli passengers held down the man who had attacked him.

India has a phrase for this, and it is carved into the entrance hall of our parliament. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, from the Maha Upanishad. It simply means the world is one family. New Delhi made it the theme of its G20 presidency in 2023, and it is the line that governments reach for and that usually means very little in practice.

It meant something really optimistic on Wednesday. Nobody on that aircraft stopped to ask where anybody was from. The people who broke into that cockpit had no idea whose life they were saving, beyond the fact that it was a life, and the man they were saving had no idea whose lives he was saving by holding on. That is what actually happened at altitude over the Arabian peninsula, and this will be a better argument for the idea for many years to come.

There is a harder story running alongside it, and it is unfinished. The co-pilot, an Omani national, was arrested and is being questioned by Saudi authorities. Israel has said it is treating the incident as a terror attack, and Netanyahu told CNN the captain had prevented a disaster on the scale of 9/11. No charge has been laid, no motive has been established, and flydubai has said it will issue a statement after examining the cockpit voice recorder. Those findings will take weeks and will matter a great deal to aviation security and to the politics of a region where very little stays uncontested for long.

None of that is Machchhar's business. His job, as every airline pilot's job is described in the manuals, was the safety of the aircraft and the people in it. He did it while being stabbed, and he did it for 174 people he had never met and will most likely never meet.

He is expected to recover. When he does, he will presumably go back to flying aeroplanes, which is what he has done since he was a young man in Dunedin learning to land in the New Zealand weather. The rest of it, the posts from prime ministers and the word hero in capital letters, will fade in the way such things do. What should not fade is the memory that one man held a door open and a hundred and seventy-four people went home alive.

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