Flydubai Captain Smit Machchhar has finally told his side of the terrifying cockpit attack that nearly turned a routine flight into a catastrophe. Speaking to The National from his hospital bed in Abu Dhabi, with his head and left arm bandaged, he said the first blow made him think something had gone horribly wrong with the aircraft's structure. He quickly realized he was being attacked, so he freed himself from his seat belts and tried to block the blows, which were aimed at his head. His hand went straight to the knob that opens the cockpit door, and he screamed his colleague's name for help before he lost consciousness. He says the scariest part was feeling the plane's nose tipping steeply downward, and that he was not sure he would make it out alive.

The attack happened on flight FZ1073, which was flying from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Sept. 30 when the co-pilot allegedly struck the captain with an emergency axe. The UAE attorney general says the suspect, a 29-year-old reportedly from Oman, was inspired by the Sept. 11 attacks and wanted to crash the plane to cause the greatest possible loss of life. Prosecutors say his radicalization began in 2017, when he was a student in Australia and was exposed to extremist material online. The jet fell thousands of feet in under a minute before passengers and crew stepped in, and two reserve pilots on board then took control and landed it safely in Saudi Arabia. One passenger, Israeli businessman Yaniv Hayun, says he rushed into the cockpit, got the attacker in a chokehold and pulled him out, then helped bring the plane out of its dive, and he credited a TV series about air disasters for his know-how. These are allegations from prosecutors and personal accounts, and the suspect has not been convicted.