EXCLUSIVE: The flydubai cockpit was empty as the aircraft plunged, Tal told me. Two additional pilots were still in the passenger cabin. He had to get them to the controls. On Thursday, I sat across from him at the Carlton hotel on Tel Aviv’s beachfront, overlooking the skyline. Tal, an Israeli businessman who lives abroad, spoke about how good it felt to see the city from there. The previous day, he and the other passengers had been desperate to land and finally reach Israel. That observation stayed with me as we worked through his account. He had noticed the two additional pilots when he boarded. During the emergency, he said, he had to shout for them to move forward. While other passengers confronted the attacker, his attention was on getting someone into the cockpit who could fly the aircraft. Tal makes very little fuss about his intervention. He kept giving credit to the people around him, explaining their contributions even when I was asking about his. We watched footage from the cabin together. He identified people and explained what he had been doing. His account also described the Israelis’ effort to secure what he called “key points” aboard the aircraft, including ensuring that an Israeli remained in the cockpit. The empty-cockpit detail is among the significant new elements in our interview. It is Tal’s eyewitness account; the precise sequence still requires independent corroboration. At the Carlton, he could take his time explaining it all, with the city he had been so anxious to reach visible beyond us. The full exclusive interview will be published in The Jerusalem Post. I’ll add the link in the first reply once it’s live.