By Michal Yaakov Itzhaki
NES ZIONA, Israel, Oct 1 (Reuters) – A passenger who helped save a flight carrying more than 170 people to Tel Aviv from crashing says he knew how to stabilise a nose-diving aircraft after watching an aircrash TV show.
Yaniv Hayun, 50, is being hailed in Israel as a hero after he and three other Israeli passengers managed to subdue the co-pilot of flydubai flight FZ1073, who had stabbed its captain, before pulling up the jet’s steering control to right it.
A second air crew aboard helped land the plane safely in Saudi Arabia.
Hayun’s brother-in-law Asaf Chen told Reuters that Hayun was travelling with his wife and two daughters and that he owns a sewage pumping company.
After arriving from Saudi Arabia at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, Hayun described how the drama onboard unfolded.
“We knew there was an attack because a woman screamed ‘stabbing’ and the plane shook,” he said. “At that moment I ran to the cockpit and the plane dived.”
He told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who met him at the airport, that the stabbed pilot probably managed to open the cockpit door before collapsing.
“One (pilot) was down and one was on the controls, and another person came in with me, I grabbed the assailant and put him in a chokehold, and pulled him out,” he told Netanyahu, in a video of their meeting distributed by Netanyahu’s office.
He and a few other people subdued the co-pilot and then he returned to pull up the unmanned steering control of the plane, Hayun said, his shirt still blood-stained from the fight.
Asked how he knew what to do in the moments before another pilot aboard, whom other passengers identified as a British man called James, took control, Hayun said: “I watch Air Crash Investigation, Mr Prime Minister.”
‘I’M NOT A HERO’
Tzvika Manes, an Israeli bank executive and one of the passengers who helped hold the co-pilot down, said they used airline earphones to tie him up.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog said on Thursday that he was nominating Hayun for the Presidential Award for Civilian Heroism, along with Manes, and Manes’ wife Tali — who was first to alert the passengers of the violence in the cockpit — and Shota Musaev, a doctor who treated the wounded captain. Musaev helped incapacitate the co-pilot with another passenger, Asaf Rajuan, who was also nominated.
“I’m not a hero,” Rajuan said at the airport. “It’s something you do without thinking, running to save your daughter’s life, your family’s life, your wife, and all the staff and people on the plane. You don’t think, you just act.”
(Reporting by Michal Yaakov Itzhaki in Nes Ziona, Maayan Lubell and Tamar Uriel-Beeri in Jerusalem and Pesha Magid at Ben Gurion Airport; Writing by Maayan Lubell; Editing by Aidan Lewis)
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