The flydubai jet carrying a cabin full of Israelis to Tel Aviv broadcast the international code for a hijacking at 1:35 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, and Flightradar24 told the world about it about an hour later. More than three hours after that, the New York Times told its readers the plane was diverted after an "altercation" between the pilots. On Saturday, the government of Dubai, which owns the airline, said its co-pilot "attempted to carry out a terrorist attack" with the cockpit's crash ax.

The Plane Was Squawking "Hijack" Before Most Americans Woke Up

Flight FZ1073, a Boeing 737 MAX 8 registered A6-FKF, left Dubai at 03:05 UTC on September 30. According to Flightradar24's incident page, it was cruising at 34,000 feet when it "began a steep descent" at 05:21 UTC. At 05:28:48 the transponder started squawking 7700, the code for a general emergency. At 05:35 it switched to 7500, the code for "unlawful interference."

Pilots are trained to dial 7500 for one thing: someone is trying to take the airplane. Flightradar24 posted the switch on X while the jet was still headed for Tabuk, Saudi Arabia. To be fair to everyone involved, that same post added that it had "NO CONFIRMATION of the nature of the situation on board at this time."

X post IDs carry an encoded timestamp, so we decoded them. Flightradar24's 7500 post went up at 06:42 UTC, which is 2:42 a.m. Eastern. The New York Times' "altercation" post went up at 10:08 UTC, or 6:08 a.m. Eastern. That is a gap of 3 hours and 25 minutes.

The Flight Data Shows a Dive, Not a Scuffle

Flightradar24 published the flight's second-by-second ADS-B data as a downloadable spreadsheet, and we went through it. The jet was level at 34,000 feet at 05:21:08 UTC. By 05:22:40 it read 16,600 feet. That is roughly 17,400 feet lost in about a minute and a half, with a brief jolt upward in the middle.

For ten straight seconds, from 05:22:15 to 05:22:25, the descent-rate field in the file sat frozen at minus 32,640 feet per minute, the largest value anywhere in the data. Ground speed climbed from about 413 knots at cruise to 598 knots at 05:22:36. One passenger told CNN the plane started "spinning a little" and it was "a death in front of our eyes moment." The numbers back them up.

Hours Later, the Times Went With "Altercation"

Here is the full post the Times sent out on X: "Breaking news: A plane flying from Dubai to Israel was diverted after an altercation between the pilot and co-pilot, Israeli officials said." There was no mention of a stabbing, a dive or a hijack code.

By then, the information was already out there. AFP had quoted the mother of a passenger who said her daughter called from Saudi Arabia and told her "one pilot tried to kill the other pilot with a knife," according to the Reuters and AFP wire report. A bloodied passenger filmed himself on board saying, in Hebrew, "We just subdued the terrorists and are preparing to land." The media watchdog CAMERA noted that the Times of Israel had reported a "growing assessment in Israel" of an attempted terror attack at 12:36 p.m. Israel time, a half hour before the Times' post.

When readers pushed back, the paper's press office answered them at 12:05 p.m. Eastern: "Our headlines and live coverage contain all the facts we're able to confirm as we confirm them. Unlike activists and partisans, we don't publish speculation or unverified information."

So Where Did "Altercation" Come From?

Credit where due: the Times attributed its wording to Israeli officials, and Israeli media also first described a fight between the pilots. Israel's Channel 12 even floated a pilot suicide attempt early on. Breaking news is messy, and nobody should pretend otherwise.

But the exact word has a paper trail. Flydubai's second public statement, still posted on Flightradar24's page, opens: "An altercation occurred in the flight deck of flight FZ 1073." It then urged "all parties to refrain from premature speculation." Flydubai is owned by the government of Dubai, according to the Times of Israel. In other words, the softest word in the story came from a company with every reason to keep the story small, and the paper that bragged about only printing confirmed facts ran with it over the aircraft's own transponder.

CNN Reached for "Suicide by Pilot"

CNN went a different direction that afternoon. On The Arena With Kasie Hunt, aviation correspondent Pete Muntean aired a passenger who said crew told them "there's a terrorist on board." Then he said, per the NewsBusters transcript, that "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is calling this an act of terror, although this does sound a lot like at least attempted or successful suicide by pilot attempts in the past." He listed EgyptAir 990, Germanwings and a 2023 Horizon Air case.

Two days later, CNN itself reported that terrorist images had turned up on the suspect's social media. CBS News, citing sources, reported that he had once posted a video of El Al jets in Dubai ending with a photo of al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Oman had pulled him off flight duty over his visits to radical websites, those sources said.

Three Days Later, Dubai's Own Government Called It Terrorism

On Saturday, the UAE's prosecutor general settled the vocabulary question. His statement went out through the state news agency WAM and was reported by the Times of Israel, AFP and others. The co-pilot, named in reports as Omani national Hamam al-Hammami, remains in UAE custody.

The prosecutor said the co-pilot attacked Indian captain Smit Machchhar "with the emergency axe and tried to take control of the aircraft." Machchhar, wounded, got the cockpit door open. Passengers, many of them Israelis, piled in and pinned the attacker, and two off-duty pilots on board landed the jet in Tabuk. Every one of the 174 people on board survived.

Why "Caution" Only Seems to Run One Direction

Nobody is asking newsrooms to guess. The complaint is that a hijack code, a 17,000-foot plunge, a bloody passenger video and an eyewitness account of a knife were all public before the Times chose a word that sounds like two coworkers shoving each other in a break room.

The same paper did not show that restraint in October 2023. It splashed Hamas' claim that an Israeli strike had killed hundreds at a Gaza hospital, then published an editors' note admitting its early coverage "relied too heavily on claims by Hamas." Unverified claims against Israel got the banner. A verified emergency signal from a plane full of Israelis got "altercation." Readers noticed the difference, and the press office called them partisans for it.

Top photo: Flydubai Boeing 737 MAX 8 A6-FKF, the aircraft that flew FZ1073, departing Dubai International Airport on January 2, 2026. (Photo: UB-TY144 via Flickr, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)