US Ambassador Mike Huckabee calls the flydubai cockpit axe attack a near “9/11 situation” and says airlines must start checking pilots’ and flight attendants’ social media for red flags.
A flydubai co-pilot accused of trying to seize a passenger jet bound for Israel nearly crashed the plane last month after attacking the captain with a cockpit axe, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee now says the near-miss should force airlines to overhaul how they screen flight crews.
Speaking on the latest episode of Pod Force One with host Miranda Devine, Huckabee described the episode as seconds from catastrophe and predicted that carriers will begin digging into social media histories of pilots and flight attendants, not only on routes into Israel.
The core facts are stark. Co-pilot Hamam al-Hammami, an Omani national, is accused of striking captain Smit Machchhar with the aircraft’s emergency axe during a Dubai-to-Tel Aviv flight, then trying to take the controls. The injured captain opened the cockpit door. Passengers rushed in, subdued the attacker, and an Israeli plumber passenger pulled the jet out of a steep dive before an off-duty Australian pilot helped land it safely.
Huckabee put the stakes in plain terms. Had the attack succeeded, he said, it would have been a “9/11 situation.”
Huckabee told Devine the plane was “probably 30 seconds from hitting the ground.” He credited passenger Yaniv Hayoun, a plumber, not a pilot, with saving everyone on board.
"He was the most gracious, humble, I think he’s overwhelmed by all this attention. I mean, this is a guy, he’s a plumber. He’s used to going and fixing pipes, and suddenly he’s saving 174 lives."
Huckabee said the co-pilot has told some investigators his goal was to fly the jet into the terminal at Ben Gurion Airport, Israel’s main international gateway near Tel Aviv. He stressed that account is “not absolutely confirmed,” but added that a crash into downtown Tel Aviv or Jerusalem would have been just as horrible.
"That would have been catastrophic. [I]t would have been such an incredible disaster had he been able to fly it into Ben Gurion, or for that matter, into downtown Tel Aviv or Jerusalem. Wherever he put that airplane, it would have been horrible."
UAE authorities and later reporting identified the flight as FlyDubai Flight 1073, a Boeing 737 MAX 8. Just the News reported that the weapon was the plane’s own cockpit emergency axe, standard equipment, not a smuggled blade, and that the Omani co-pilot attacked the captain then tried to seize control.
Captain Machchhar later described the assault in detail. According to a Breitbart report on the incident, Hammami asked to pray, then struck him minutes later.
"Suddenly, after four or five minutes, there was a big blow to the back of my head."
Machchhar said he fought through the injury to open the door so help could reach the flight deck.
"I had one last fight left in me. If I don’t do it, I’m going to die."
Passengers, including Hayoun, restrained Hammami. Off-duty pilots then landed the damaged jet in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. Reporting on the case also noted that accounts linked to Hammami displayed al-Qaeda imagery and propaganda, and that he had previously been barred by Oman Air over extremist views before flydubai hired him without full background checks.
S1 material already flagged that the co-pilot reportedly held an obsession with crashing a passenger jet on Israeli soil and had researched potential attacks for months. The hiring gap is the part Huckabee refuses to wave away.
On the podcast, Huckabee went straight at the personnel failure.
"The question I think will be a tough one for everyone to answer: How did this guy get hired? Now maybe they were just desperate for pilots, and they looked the other way at some of his background, or maybe they didn’t check. But the answer to your question: Does this change the security methods? Oh boy, does it ever!"
He said the fallout will not stop at Israel routes. Airlines, in his view, will start reviewing social media for warning signs across their crews.
"Not just for pilots flying into Israel, but I think every airline now is going to be looking at social media accounts. They’re going to be really wanting to know: Is there any red flag here? Flight attendants, same thing, because if you have a flight attendant, a flight attendant could wreak havoc. They have access to the cockpit."
That is a practical security argument, not theater. Cockpit access, emergency tools already on board, and thin vetting created a single point of failure. Passengers and an off-duty pilot closed the gap in real time. A serious carrier does not wait for the next near-miss to fix the front end of hiring.
Huckabee called the survival of the flight “just one of those amazing things.” The timeline underneath it is less comforting. The co-pilot allegedly spent months researching attack options. He was still in the right seat of a jet headed toward Israel. When he moved, the captain was wounded, the aircraft went into a dive, and only a plumber and other passengers kept 174 people alive long enough for a safe landing in Saudi Arabia.
Formal charges, the full investigative file, and any final legal finding of terrorism motive were not detailed in the available accounts. What is on the record is the axe attack, the attempted takeover, the passenger intervention, the near-impact timeline Huckabee described, and the ambassador’s warning that crew screening, including open social media, is about to get sharper industry-wide.
Airlines that treat social media and prior extremist flags as optional paperwork are gambling with other people’s lives. The flydubai cabin already showed what that gamble costs when it almost fails.
