What Happened In The Dubai-Tel Aviv Flight Attack?
Newscast
The episode investigates a dramatic attempted hijacking on a Fly Dubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv and the subsequent passenger interventi
Key takeaways
- A flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv issued a 7500 squawk code, indicating unlawful interference or hijacking.
- The aircraft experienced a massive altitude drop of 17,000 feet in approximately 90 seconds before landing in Saudi Arabia.
Main topics
- Dubai-Tel Aviv flight hijacking attempt
- AI risks to financial stability
Notable quotes
You don't think. You don't think. You just act.
Conclusion
The episode highlights the growing intersection of technological volat
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:00) This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Speaker 6 (0:05) You might drink it every day, but did you know that the history of tea is steeped in skullduggery, colonialism and industrial espionage? I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me. We're the comedy show that takes history seriously. And in our latest episode, we spill the tea on tea. Join us to unpack the ancient Chinese origins of the drink and find out how it became the national drink of modern Britain. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 4 (0:38) Hello. When we were recording Wednesday's episode of Newscast, news was emerging about the flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv in Israel, where it appeared that one of the pilots had attacked the other pilot and control of the plane was only rested back after some of the passengers intervened in the cockpit. The plane was then able to land safely in Saudi Arabia. Now, as we record this episode of Newscast on Thursday, there is still quite a lot we don't know, but we have been able to put together a lot more details around the story. So that is what you will hear on this episode of Newscast. Newscast. Speaker 6 (1:14) Newscast from the BBC. Humanity's next great voyage begins. I don't know who the Prime Minister is, mate. I'm Speaker 7 (1:20) Andy and I'm not looking at my best right now. Speaker 5 (1:22) I see that he was, I guess, the mayor of a town. Ooh la Speaker 4 (1:25) la. Speaker 5 (1:25) Thinking Speaker 4 (1:26) about it like a panto helped. And what will you do? Stare at a wall. Speaker 7 (1:31) Do we play music now or what do we do? Speaker 4 (1:33) Hello, it's Adam in the Newscast studio. And to bring us up to date with the dramatic story of the Fly Dubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, we're joined down the line by Panorama's Jane Corbin. Hi, Jane. Hello, Adam. And Thomas Copeland, our colleague from BBC Verify, is here. Hello, Thomas. Hi, Adam. How are you doing? So, Jane, I'll get you to do some of the politics and some of what we've learned about the incident. But, Thomas, just... Talk us through how you at BBC Verify realised it was going on. Because I have a feeling you knew about it through your work before I knew about it. Maybe. So, Speaker 3 (2:04) I mean... Anything to do with flights, planes, there's quite a lot of data and there's quite a lot of open source data. So the first thing that is an indication to us that something's going on is planes issue these like squawk codes. There's loads and loads of different codes, but there's a couple of ones that are like really important. And once you're in this kind of like open source or plane tracking world, you kind of tend to know three main ones. And one of them is 7700. So once planes start to squawk 7700, that's like an international code for a general formative emergency. And that hangs Speaker 4 (2:36) up on your computer just anyway. Speaker 3 (2:38) So that is broadcast to air traffic controllers. And the idea is that planes have these four-digit codes. They're totally randomised, but there are a couple of... a bunch of different codes that are the same all over the world. So that's broadcast to open source, like plane tracking platforms. A Flightradar24 is one that people might have used, but there's a whole bunch of different ones. So we have systems in place just to like alert us to the fact, and that's not terribly like groundbreaking or technical stuff. It's quite a common thing. And actually these like 7700 codes, general emergency codes, it's always something to be aware of because a story might develop in time, but frequently you'll get that code for a little bit of time and then a plane will switch it off. off again and there's lots of different reasons but uh so so this plane had been in the air for about two hours flying totally normally and then it issues a 7700 code which you know starts to flag it to us and that was at about let me think i have it written down actually yeah so about half six in the morning it issues that code and i suppose if you look through our kind of work group chat you would be able to see people saying oh this planes broadcast that code, one to keep an eye on. Seven minutes after that, that code changes from 7700 to 7500. And that's a much more unusual code. It indicates unlawful interference, which typically means a hijacking. And that's when people are starting to say, hold on, we really need to take a look at what's happening here. Where's this plane come from? Where it's going? What could possibly be happening? And at that point... you know, a bunch of us on the team are sort of already looking at this plane and trying to understand, as well as other things, you know, it's no long, it's not quite like Speaker 4 (4:10) the top thing at that stage. And at this point, the plane is very close to Israeli airspace. Speaker 3 (4:14) Yeah, it's just about to cross over from, it's just about to cross over from Saudi airspace into Jordan's airspace. And... So what happens is that we get that indication of like this 7500 code. Then it crosses into Jordan's airspace and it loops back the other way and heads down towards this Saudi airport where it ultimately landed Tabuk. And once we start looking at the plane, we notice something really unusual. above and beyond the fact that it's issuing these emergency codes, and that is that its altitude has taken this massive, massive plummet just about 5-10 minutes before it issues that first general emergency code. In about 90 seconds, this plane descended from its general operating altitude of 34,000 feet. It plummeted 17,000 feet, half its entire altitude, to about 16,600 feet in like 100 seconds. That... is by and large majorly not normal. And one of the first things we did was hop on the phone to a couple of aviation experts. At this stage, we don't have the wider reporting telling us exactly what's going on. All we have is this data, and they're indicating to us... There's a couple of accidental reasons why this might happen, but a combination of those kind of emergency squat codes and that rapid altitude change, very early on, experts are saying to us that's highly likely like a deliberate attempt to seize control of the aircraft. And at what point were you then able to get a handle on what had actually happened? Well, what happens then is the plane switched off its transponder, its sort of location beacon, about... at about 10 past, let me see, it was about 10 past seven UK time. And then it lands about 50 minutes after that. So when it switches off its transponder, that's also... pretty concerning as well. Military aircraft might not have their transponders on, but by and large, like passenger jets, if they switch on their transponder, off their transponder, like something has gone badly wrong. Once it lands, we can get all of the data. And the amazing thing about like flight tracking and any of these kind of open source flights, flight stories that we will cover is there is a wealth of information relatively early. Planes, and we can get access to this data, planes will record basically for every single second of the flight. They're their Speaker 4 (6:26) coordinates, Speaker 3 (6:26) latitude and longitude, their vertical speed, their ground speed and their altitude. So pretty quickly you can be like tracking and tracing exactly the journey that this plane has taken. Once it lands, we can get all that data and fully understand the kind of journey that it was on. And then also you have people coming off the plane, uploading pictures, uploading videos, uploading like, you know, their witness account of what actually happened. And that's when we're starting to sort of piece it together in a bit more detail. Speaker 4 (6:50) And Jane, it was actually quite incredible how quickly that raw material started emerging. Speaker 2 (6:56) Yeah, I mean, it seemed people were almost sending it from the plane. They're certainly sending it as soon as they got down. And they were taking stills and they were taking video. And even of the events almost happening inside the cockpit where those four passengers managed to get in. So, yeah, there was a wealth of material. And I'm sure we haven't seen the last of it. There's going to be more to come. Speaker 4 (7:14) And then as the passengers started arriving in Tel Aviv at their final destination on Wednesday night, we started hearing from them directly. One of them is Asaf Rajwan. Speaker 1 (7:22) I didn't think about it. It's, you know, it's just something that you do without thinking. Just run into there and save your daughter's life, your family wife, your wife and all the staff and all the people in the plane. You don't think. You don't think. You just act. Speaker 4 (7:39) And Thomas, there's also been a lot of misinformation about what might have happened on the plane. What is the information we have about what actually took place? place? Speaker 3 (7:47) Well, Speaker 4 (7:48) almost immediately after Speaker 3 (7:49) the plane landed, you know, people started to upload their pictures and videos. And along with that, we started to get a whole bunch of ultimately footage that was old, that was fake, sort of prior, like air traffic control chatter between unrelated old footage. And so I guess, you know, it's part of our job to sort of try to, you know, sort the fact from the fiction. And a lot of that is kind of... a lot more uninteresting than it sounds. We know we're sitting there trying to work out what the interior of a fly-to-buy plane looks like so we can match it up to this sort of like, you know, the livery of this sort of the internal design of the plane, trying to match up exactly where passengers are. Can we see the same passengers in different planes? And again, like you're starting to get these kind of eyewitness videos are dribbling in and each of them tells a little bit of the story or part of it from their perspective. I mean, certainly from the very earliest videos and pictures that were being like uploaded online, a