According to Israel’s prime minister, a pilot stabbed a fellow pilot and sought to bring down a flight bound from the United Arab Emirates to Israel.

Passengers, a great many of them Israelis, feared for their lives as the FlyDubai aircraft surrendered half its altitude in the span of roughly a minute.

With Israel having scrambled fighter jets amid apprehensions of a potential hijacking, a passenger and a crew member, having forced their way into the cockpit, subdued the attacker, while other crew members seized control of the aircraft, which subsequently landed safely in Saudi Arabia.

The impetus behind Wednesday's attack remained shrouded in ambiguity.

The harrowing flight transpired mere days prior to the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel that precipitated the war in Gaza.

It has reignited apprehensions regarding airline security and trained scrutiny upon a disquieting question: Are pilots a formidable threat to the flying public’s safety?

Concerning the events aboard FlyDubai flight FZ1073, the following constitutes the sum of what is known — and what remains unknown:

The distress call was received at 8:44 a.m. local time, roughly two and a half hours after the flight — carrying approximately 170 passengers — had departed Dubai, bound for Tel Aviv.

According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the captain and first officer had been embroiled in an altercation within the cockpit after one endeavoured to stab the other and bring the aircraft down.

The aircraft precipitously shed altitude — plummeting from 33,000 feet to 17,000 feet (roughly 10,000 meters to 5,100 meters) within the span of approximately one minute.

It subsequently orbited in close proximity to the Jordanian border before touching down in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, some hour thereafter.

Both pilots sustained injuries of a severity necessitating hospitalisation, as per a statement issued by Tabuk's Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Airport.

Netanyahu asserted that Saudi Arabia had apprehended one of the pilots.

An aircraft bearing passengers from the flight effected its descent and touched down on Wednesday evening in Israel.

A passenger and a crew member contrived to breach the cockpit, thereby enabling other crew members to gain entry and pilot the aircraft to a safe landing, according to Netanyahu, who cited a passenger with whom he had spoken.

The cockpit door on every aircraft remains secured throughout flight as a security imperative — a protocol that attained industry-wide ubiquity in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, wherein hijackers forcibly breached the cockpits of four domestic flights within the United States.

It remains ambiguous how the passenger and crew contrived to gain access to the FlyDubai cockpit, given that aircraft doors are fortified to withstand attempts to force them open.

Among the unresolved questions attending this incident is how anyone aboard the aircraft — a pilot included — could have succeeded in smuggling a knife onboard.

The dimensions of the knife deployed in the attack remain undetermined.

Pilots are subjected to stringent vetting, encompassing passage through metal detectors at checkpoints across all airports.

Furthermore, it is de rigueur for airlines to scrutinise their pilots' backgrounds for criminal and employment history, as well as their physical and mental fitness, in addition to subjecting them to intelligence and security screening.

Israel boasts some of the most stringent airline security protocols globally.

Passengers aboard Israel-bound flights are routinely singled out for interrogation and luggage inspections after having cleared conventional airport security.

It remains indeterminate whether the pilots of the FlyDubai flight had undergone screening of comparable rigour.

On exceedingly rare occasions, airline security protocols have been known to fail.

In 2015, the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 locked the captain out of the cockpit and deliberately set the plane on a collision course with a mountainside, killing all 150 people aboard.