Ed covered the attempted hijacking of a passenger plane this morning by the plane’s co-pilot. The co-pilot stabbed the pilot several times and then sent the plane into a steep dive. But fortunately the pilot was able to fight back and may have opened the door to allow passengers to storm inside and fight off the deranged co-pilot.
The Free Press has published an interview with a man who entered the cockpit and put the co-pilot in a choke hold. Some of the details are pretty amazing.
I spoke with Yaniv Hayoun, a passenger on the plane, immediately after he landed. Hayoun was one of the people who stormed the cockpit.
“I saw my wife and children and realized I have to do something,” he told me. Hayoun, who works in maintenance and has no background in security, had a split-second decision to make. He told me that he felt compelled to help save his family’s lives, and those of the rest of the passengers on the plane.
He ran toward the cockpit just as the plane went into a steep dive. That tossed him off his feet and for a moment he couldn’t move. But then the plane leveled out just a bit.
Hayoun said he saw the entire scene unfold in real time. “There was complete chaos. One of the pilots stabbed another pilot. He tried to crash us. When it leveled out a little, just a little, we managed to get back up. I managed to open the cockpit door with the help of another crewmember. We physically fought with the co-pilot; he was going wild. I put him in a choke hold, took control of him, and dragged him out of the cockpit,” he told me. “Then I called for other Israelis to help restrain him.”
After securing the crazed co-pilot he went back into the cockpit. The pilot was severely injured and had been pulled out so the cockpit was briefly empty. And this part is almost unbelievable. He pulled the plane out of a steep dive because he’d seen it done on a TV show.
Hayoun then returned to the cockpit. “I went back to the controls and pulled back on the yoke, because there was no one left in the cockpit,” he said.
I asked him how he had known what to do. “I had seen Air Crash Investigation on TV,” he told me, laughing. “I pulled back on the controls, and then another pilot came in and said he was taking control of the aircraft.”
Apparently there were two Israeli airline pilots who happened to be on the plane as passengers. They flew the plane to a safe landing.
Hayoun’s wife was also on the plane. She told the Free Press, “It’s a miracle that we’re alive.” It really does sound like there were some very heroic actions on a plane full of regular people. First you had the pilot who fought back and signaled the attempted hijacking and got the door to the cockpit open. You can imagine that if the co-pilot had succeeded in overpowering him quickly, this would have ended much differently.
Then there were the people who rushed the cockpit and fought off the co-pilot. Then there were the people who tied him up and rendered aid to the injured pilot. Then there were the two other pilots who took over and safely landed the plane. All of these people stepped up and turned an almost certain tragedy into a miracle.
This is almost like the story of Flight 93 except this one has a happy ending, probably thanks to the fact that there was only one armed hijacker to overpower instead of four. The other planes all had five hijackers that day but one of the five who was supposed to be on Flight 93 couldn’t gain entry to the U.S.
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