Absurdity
FlyDubai Called The Cockpit Stabbing And Crash Attempt A Brawl
By Jeff Garstein, . BSN Network. Satire.
DUBAI, UAE (BSN) -- Israeli officials confirmed Thursday that the incident described by flydubai as an onboard "brawl" was, in fact, the aircraft's copilot attempting to stab the captain with a knife and then use the resulting vacancy to crash the plane into Tel Aviv.
The flight was FZ1073, a routine service from Dubai to Tel Aviv carrying passengers who, by all accounts, had not booked a hijacking.
The copilot, whose name Israeli authorities have not released, allegedly produced a knife inside the cockpit, attacked the captain, and then attempted to seize control of the aircraft. The captain survived. The copilot was restrained. The plane landed. FlydDubai described this sequence of events as a brawl.
The word brawl is doing approximately fourteen jobs it was not designed for.
A brawl is what happens outside a bar at 1 a.m. in a parking lot over something someone said about someone's girlfriend. A brawl involves shoving. A brawl does not involve one participant having a knife, a flight plan, and a destination he has chosen unilaterally for 200 people who paid for a different one.
Flydubai issued a statement describing the situation as "an onboard security incident" and confirmed it was now cooperating with Israeli and Emirati authorities. The airline did not explain which member of its communications team read the phrase "copilot stabs captain and attempts to crash aircraft" and typed the word brawl, or what that person understood a brawl to be.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the flight crew for "preventing a disaster" and called it a terrorist attack, which is the other end of the spectrum from brawl, and frankly a more accurate place to start.
Former aviation security consultant Raymond Chu, who has spent twenty-two years reviewing incident reports, told reporters the initial characterisation was "consistent with airlines' general preference for language that does not cause passengers to reconsider flying."
"You don't want to lead with hijacking," Chu said. "Brawl tests well. Brawl suggests the situation is resolved, interpersonal, and not structural. Brawl says: the plane is fine. It was just two guys."
He added that in his experience, the word incident covers most things up to and including the aircraft being on fire.
Passenger accounts posted to social media described seeing crew members running toward the front of the plane, followed by a loud and sustained altercation, followed by a landing in Tel Aviv under what one traveller called "a very tense silence."
One passenger, posting under the name GulfTravels88, wrote: "They told us there had been a disagreement and we should remain in our seats. I assumed it was about the overhead bin. It was not about the overhead bin."
Israeli authorities confirmed the captain required medical treatment. They confirmed the copilot was in custody. They did not confirm what the copilot's specific grievance was, though they noted the target was Tel Aviv and the method was the controls of a commercial aircraft, which narrows it somewhat.
Flydubai operates 61 aircraft out of Dubai International Airport and carries roughly 10 million passengers per year. None of that information is relevant to the question of what a brawl is, but it is the kind of thing a company mentions when it would like the conversation to move in a different direction.
As of Thursday afternoon, the airline's website listed FZ1073 as having arrived on time.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2026/09/30/israel-says-bloody-brawl-aboard-emirati-plane-was-thwarted-hijacking/