For a few terrifying minutes, nobody on the flydubai flight knew who was flying the plane.
The Israel-bound aircraft was carrying 182 people when passengers realised something was terribly wrong inside the cockpit. The co-pilot was attacking the captain. There was blood everywhere. The aircraft was plunging.
Then the cockpit door opened. The captain, badly wounded, had somehow managed to unlock it.
Passengers rushed forward. One of them grabbed the co-pilot and pulled him out. Others joined in, trying to restrain the attacker.
And then two men appeared.
They were pilots. They had been travelling on the flight as passengers, still in uniform; they still hadn't been publicly identified. flydubai has described them only as on-duty crew members travelling on the aircraft. The airline has not publicly explained why their identities have not been released.
But one passenger sitting in the second row, Daniel Schlichter, remembers exactly what happened next. He described their appearance as a miracle.
Bringing two extra pilots is not an everyday practice. He said the two pilots had been on board by chance because they were scheduled to fly the aircraft back from Tel Aviv. In aviation, travelling as a passenger for an upcoming flight is known as 'deadheading'.
That ordinary scheduling detail suddenly became the difference between having two trained pilots on board and having none.
As passengers struggled with the co-pilot, one of the travelling pilots moved towards the cockpit.
The two men responded after screaming passengers discovered what was unfolding in the cockpit. They said the copilot was attacking the captain over and over, and blood was everywhere. The captain, while badly wounded, managed to unlock the cockpit door.
Schlichter said the man practically jumped over the people restraining the attacker, reached the controls and took over.
“He was actually kind of jumping above the guys that were handling the terrorist, and he reached out to the pilot area and started to take over,” Schlichter said.
Once the two entered the cockpit and closed the door, Schlichter wasn't sure who did what inside. It took “quite a lot of minutes,” maybe 10 or more, to stabilize the plane after a descent so extreme that part of its rudder was torn away.
Nobody outside the cockpit knew what was happening.
The aircraft had gone into such a severe descent that part of its rudder had been torn away. A Mayday call was made as the pilots searched desperately for somewhere to land.
But then came another unsettling silence. The two pilots did not immediately communicate with the passengers.
Schlichter began to wonder whether the danger was over at all.
“We actually did not have any communication with us, and I have to tell you, I was worried about this,” he said.
The passengers were heading towards Israel. They were not far from Iran. And, Schlichter said, he began wondering whether the men in the cockpit might be taking the aircraft somewhere else.
“Maybe Iran, or I don't know where,” he recalled thinking. Then, about 45 minutes later, came the announcement everyone had been waiting for.
The pilots said they would land in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Everything was going to be OK.
And the two unidentified pilots, who had boarded the plane simply because they were scheduled to fly it later, became something else entirely.
(With inputs from AP via PTI)