At the height of the drama aboard the flydubai flight last Wednesday, after repeatedly striking the Indian captain, who used his remaining strength to activate the switch allowing the cockpit door to be opened, the Omani terrorist co-pilot realized his plan to crash the aircraft would fail. He then tried to bring the plane down in the Saudi desert, according to a new investigation by Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.
The report said the attacker disconnected the autopilot, took control of the aircraft and pushed the controls sharply forward. The plane lost 16,000 feet in less than a minute.
Smith Machachar and Hammam al-Hammami
The investigation also raises a possibility not previously reported: that the attacker may have cut the fuel supply to the engines, effectively shutting them down.
Two captains who spoke with Corriere della Sera reached that conclusion after examining one of the videos documenting passengers’ efforts to stop the attacker. In the footage, emergency lights suddenly illuminate the passenger cabin, lighting designed to assist evacuation during an emergency or when an aircraft is on the ground. At cruising altitude, the report noted, they would not normally be activated.
According to the captains cited by the newspaper, those emergency lights can come on when a Boeing 737 loses its main electrical power source and switches to battery power. For that to happen, either the generators or the engines would have to be shut down.
Investigators will therefore need to determine whether the co-pilot moved the switches controlling fuel flow to the engines from the “Run” position to “Cutoff.”
Corriere della Sera said its investigation was based on passenger testimony, reports submitted to security authorities by the flight crew, accounts from people with knowledge of the incident, airport employees, air traffic controllers and data from several platforms. Videos recorded aboard the aircraft were analyzed by Boeing 737 captains who spoke with the newspaper.
Another detail disclosed in the report concerns the emergency code transmitted from the aircraft after additional pilots were summoned into the cockpit.
One of those pilots transmitted squawk code 7700, which signals a general emergency aboard a commercial aircraft without specifying the nature of the problem. Air traffic controllers initially did not understand what was happening.
Seven minutes later, the emergency code was changed to 7500, indicating suspected hijacking. By then, the aircraft was approaching Jordanian airspace, and controllers instructed it to turn back.
Seven minutes after that, air traffic control ordered the plane to continue to Tabuk, Saudi Arabia, for an emergency landing.