According to Israel’s prime minister, one pilot stabbed another and attempted to crash a flight from the United Arab Emirates to Israel.

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

As Israel scrambled fighter jets amid concerns of a potential hijacking, a passenger and a crew member forcibly entered the cockpit to overpower the assailant, while other crew members regained command of the aircraft, which ultimately landed safely in Saudi Arabia.

What motivated Wednesday’s attack remained a matter of conjecture.

The terrifying flight happened just days before the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that started the war in Gaza.

It has revived fears about airline security and drawn attention to a troubling question: Are pilots a major threat to the flying public’s safety?

Here is what we know — and what we do not — regarding the events that transpired on FlyDubai flight FZ1073:

The distress signal 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 engaged in a struggle within the cockpit after one attempted to stab the other and bring down the aircraft.

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

It subsequently circled near the Jordanian border before touching down in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, some hour thereafter.

Both pilots sustained injuries necessitating hospital treatment, 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 transporting passengers from the flight made its landing in Israel on Wednesday evening.

According to Netanyahu, who cited a passenger he had spoken to, a passenger and a crew member managed to break into the cockpit, which allowed other crew members to enter and fly the plane to a safe landing.

For security reasons, the cockpit door on every aircraft stays locked during flight — a measure that became the industry standard following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when hijackers broke into the cockpits of four domestic flights in the United States.

It is unclear how the passenger and crew managed to enter the FlyDubai cockpit, as aircraft doors are reinforced to resist attempts to break them down.

A central question arising from this incident is how anyone aboard the aircraft — a pilot included — could have succeeded in smuggling a knife onboard.

It remains uncertain what the dimensions of the knife employed in the assault were.

Pilots are subjected to rigorous screening procedures, which include passing through metal detectors, at checkpoints across all airports.

Furthermore, it is standard practice for airlines to scrutinise their pilots' backgrounds for any criminal or employment history, to assess their physical and mental well-being, and to have them undergo intelligence and security screening.

Israel boasts some of the most rigorous airline security protocols in the world.

Passengers travelling on flights bound for Israel are routinely singled out for interrogation and luggage inspections once they have cleared standard airport security.

It remains unclear whether the pilots of the FlyDubai flight had undergone screening of comparable intensity.

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.