Absolutely amazing first hand testimony from the heroic Captain Smith Machchar who fought off his co-pilot hijacker:
"It was It it just was a normal flight, and the the co-pilot offered, I mean, he demand, not demanded, but he wanted to pray, which a lot of locals – they do pray, and which is not out of the ordinary. But while he was praying, out of respect, I was just looking at the front and not at the back. And suddenly, after I think I would say about four or five minutes, there was a big blow to the back of my head.
My first thought was that there was a catastrophic damage to the aircraft, and something is not right. But then, after that, the blows kept coming, one after the other, and that's when I realised that it's not the aircraft; it's the other guy who was in the cockpit with me.
I did try to stop him, but because of his initial blows, my vision was almost like nothing, and I was my I was completely blurred out, and at that point, the next thought I, the next feeling that I had was that the aircraft was sharply going down.
So my memory is still in bits and pieces right now, but this is what I remember out of that time, and I did try to, I did try and manage to open the door once, but I think he shut it back close. And at this point, I remember I was lying down on the cockpit floor, and I felt the aircraft and the whooshing sound and people screaming, and as I was telling the ambassador here that I had that one last fight left in me. That you know, call it personal or call it for people, but let's say I did it. That if I don't do it, I'm going to die.
And that's when I pushed against everything. I gave everything that I had, and just went for the door and opened the door. And thankfully, people were waiting to pounce back, took over the control, and the rest is what you know.
…
The door from the inside has a a twist to open mechanism, and from the outside it can be only opened with a code. So my colleagues from outside were trying to put in the code, but the guy was not allowing to open the code, and the only way to open the door was to reach the knob, and like any other knob, just to twist it open, and it opens on its own. So there is no pin, but yes, the door. It was a short, quick twist, but the the point was to reach to that point, to reach to that place, and once I had my hand on the knob, I, I, I guess I, I, I twisted it and I opened it."
Prime Minister of Israel