Fox & Friends stopped Wednesday so hosts could apologize after producers aired Shanksville 9/11 crash footage during coverage of a cockpit stabbing on an Israel-bound flight.
Foreign correspondent Jeff Paul was live on the morning show with the latest on a Flydubai jet bound for Israel when the wrong pictures rolled. Viewers briefly saw the open field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 slammed into the ground on September 11, 2001, after passengers and crew stormed the cockpit.
On-screen text made the error plain: “SHANKSVILLE, PA Sept. 11, 2001.” The clip was pulled within a few seconds. Roughly half an hour later, the program halted so cohost Brian Kilmeade could face the camera.
Daily Mail reported that Kilmeade, joined on set by Lawrence Jones and Ainsley Earhardt, told viewers the network had put up unrelated video and was still sorting out the underlying flight drama.
"We were just getting the latest on this story, we aired some footage unrelated. We apologize for any confusion. We’re still also trying to make sense of what just took place,"
As of the Daily Mail account, Fox had not offered a fuller explanation for how the 25-year-old crash-site b-roll was selected. The network was approached for comment.
The segment was covering a far more urgent story than a production mix-up. Flightradar24 data showed the Flydubai aircraft begin losing altitude at a steep rate around 1:22 a.m. EST. The jet briefly plummeted 17,400 feet before the situation was brought under control.
The plane diverted and landed at Tabuk airport in Saudi Arabia. Officials there said both pilots were hospitalized with injuries. The assailant was arrested and was being interrogated by Saudi authorities. The pilots had not been publicly identified.
On air, Jones relayed an early line from an Israeli official to the Jerusalem Post: the episode “was an attempt to hijack the plane and crash it into the ground.”
A few hours after the incident, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the nation in a video statement. He said one pilot on the Israel-bound flight stabbed the other and seemingly tried to crash the plane. Passengers and crew subdued the attacker. Netanyahu called those passengers and crew “heroes” who “prevented a major disaster.”
Israeli officials said Wednesday morning they were organizing the safe return of their citizens. An official told CNN the country was exploring whether to send a military or civilian aircraft to bring passengers home. The episode remained under investigation.
The pictures Fox briefly put on screen carried their own history. Almost exactly 25 years earlier, four al-Qaeda terrorists seized United Flight 93. Passengers and crew learned by phone what had already hit New York and the Pentagon. They rushed the cockpit. The airliner met the earth at 560 mph in that Shanksville field. The intended target, long stated in the public record, was the U.S. Capitol. A boulder at the Flight 93 National Memorial marks the place where those 40 passengers and crew stopped a worse attack.
That is the footage that flashed beside a live report on another cockpit fight, another dive, and another group of passengers who refused to sit still.
Producers fixed the video within seconds. Kilmeade owned the error on air. The serious work continued off camera in Saudi custody and in Israeli planning rooms: an accused attacker under interrogation, two injured pilots in hospital care, and a plane full of people who had just lived through a midair struggle for control.
Fox’s flub was a bad match of sacred images to breaking news. The flight itself was something harder. A pilot fight, a stabbing, a sudden plunge of more than 17,000 feet, and civilians who again had to finish what the cockpit could not.
When a jet starts dropping and the people in the cabin have to act, nostalgia b-roll is the least of anyone’s problems, and the last line of defense is still the passengers willing to stand up.
