A FlyDubai co-pilot armed with a crash axe tried to seize control of a commercial flight and slam it into Tel Aviv's main airport terminal last month — a 9/11-style plot that nearly succeeded and will inevitably be wielded to demand deeper U.S. entanglement in the Middle East.
UAE Prosecutor Hamad al-Shamsi said Friday that 29-year-old Omani national Hamam al-Hammami attacked Captain Smit Machchhar in the cockpit over Jordanian and Saudi airspace on Sept. 30 "with the intention of causing the greatest possible number of human casualties." Most of the 174 passengers aboard were Israeli. The prosecutor's statement, carried by the state news agency WAM, said al-Hammami "drew inspiration" from the September 11 attacks and had used two prior Dubai-to-Tel Aviv flights to reconnoiter the route and the airport.
This is a story about a lone-wolf extremist who slipped through every screen a government-owned airline had — and about why that is not America's problem to solve.
Al-Hammami confessed in the presence of his lawyer to acting alone, providing what the prosecutor called "a detailed confession outlining his motives and the stages of planning and execution." He was radicalized at a mosque in Australia while attending the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2017. FlyDubai's own security and professional checks flagged nothing — which raises questions about the competence of airline security in the Gulf, not about whether the U.S. Navy needs to park another carrier group off the coast.
The captain, bloodied and beaten, managed to open the cockpit door. Passengers rushed in and detained al-Hammami. Two reserve pilots then landed the plane at Tabuk airport in Saudi Arabia. The aircraft had plummeted roughly 14,000 to 16,000 feet in under a minute during the struggle. NBC News reported the full details of the prosecutor's statement Friday — the most comprehensive account since the UAE took over the investigation.
Here is what the coverage will not emphasize: FlyDubai is a government-owned airline. A UAE state enterprise failed to detect a radicalized pilot who had been planning this attack across multiple flights. The Abraham Accords crowd will use this near-massacre to argue that America must deepen its security commitments to Gulf states and Israel — more aid, more weapons, more presence. The opposite conclusion follows. A region where state-owned airlines cannot vet their own cockpits is a region where American blood and treasure accomplish nothing durable.
No American was on that flight. No American base was targeted. The UAE can investigate its own failure. Israel can secure its own airport. The question is not whether al-Hammami is dangerous — he clearly is. The question is why a single American dollar or soldier should be committed to managing the consequences.
