Former pilot unpacks terrifying incident on Flydubai flight

Joining me on the line now is James Nixon, former A380 pilot and aviation expert, and I'm about to pick his brain because this is a terrifying incident that we have all seen over the last 24 hours. FlyDubai flight 1073 that saw passengers storm the cockpit and overpower a first officer after he allegedly stabbed the captain and then tried to crash the plane. So this flight was from Dubai en route to Tel Aviv and Israel, and it is what many are considering to be an act of terrorism. It is every aviation worker's worst nightmare. It is every passenger's worst nightmare. How does it happen? Joining me on the line now, as I said, James Nixon, former A380 pilot, aviation expert. James, good afternoon.

G'day, Shane.

You must have been stunned by what you saw from not only the videos, but the harrowing stories that emanated out of this FlyDubai flight.

Yes, it's been a long night trying to find out what's true and what's not true. But what is true is that a guy who was the captain, an Indian captain, [clears throat] apparently did his flight training in New Zealand. His name is Captain Schmidt Matcher, and he was s- had the presence of mind after being stabbed to make sure that he transfe- put a transponder code in for the emergency code, seven seven zero zero, and then a few seconds later, he changed that to the hijacking code, which is very, very, very rarely used. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard of it being used in my career. Um, and also having the presence of mind to open the cockpit door while he was going down, and, uh, he's a bit of a hero, I think.

Th- that to me, James, that, that heroic action of opening the cockpit door such that those behind it could hear, see, and then activate themselves to take action. Because if that cockpit door isn't open, we've heard other stories about this, once that cockpit door is, is, is... remains locked, o- others can't get in, and the, the co-pilot would have just had complete control over the aircraft.

Correct. There's, uh... the crew would have responded with their normal code. Uh, when they hadn't been let in, they would have responded with the emergency code, but that takes a time period. It's a, uh, a time lock. Uh, so it would have been about 40 seconds later, and by then they would have been in the ground. They were going down at such a great rate of knots.

It, it, it seems absolutely terrifying, the fact that the passengers were able to, to take control of the aircraft, the fact that there were two other, uh, trained FlyDubai pilots on that w- were then ultimately able to, to take control and an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. But for to be a pilot himself, James, I mean, that, that's the scary thing here for any passenger, that a, a pilot at the front of the plane wants to do not only his captain, but the entire passenger, uh, uh, entire flight crew harm on that aircraft.

We've seen it happen twice in the world before, once in SilkAir in Indonesia and, uh, and another time from an EgyptAir pilot. Uh, you know, people pass the selection. They go through a huge security check before they get into these jobs, and there's a large number of psych testing questions. I, I remember one, uh, I did