The Guardian's coverage of the flydubai flight 1073 incident, which plunged 17,000ft in under two minutes amid claims of terrorism and hijacking, involved sifting through misinformation in real time, reporters and editors have revealed.
Incident Overview
Flight FZ 1073, a budget flight to Tel Aviv, plummeted from its cruising altitude of about 34,000ft to 17,000ft in less than two minutes, just as it reached the Saudi-Jordanian border. The plane made a safe emergency landing in Saudi Arabia just before 11am local time on Wednesday, with all 174 passengers on board escaping serious injury.
The captain, Smit Machchhar, was bleeding heavily from multiple stab wounds but managed to release his cockpit door, allowing passengers and crew to overpower the co-pilot, an Omani national, who had attacked him in an apparent attempt to crash the plane. Other crew members stabilised the flight.
Geopolitical Context
The incident occurred amid extreme regional instability, with the Strait of Hormuz closed due to the US-Israel assault on Iran and renewed conflict in Yemen. It also came weeks ahead of Israeli elections, with polls showing Netanyahu's coalition unlikely to meet the threshold needed to form a government.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Fox News it was "too early to say" if there was any Iranian involvement, while claiming the co-pilot had previously undergone radical Islamist indoctrination and was suicidal. Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, described the incident as a "terror attack," but two Israeli security sources later told Reuters they had not found Iranian involvement.
Reporting Challenges
William Christou, a Beirut-based reporter, said, "They're examining whether it's a terror attack, whether it had any previous planning or prior direction, and if it could be a lone wolf attacker, who was perhaps motivated by anti-Israel hate, but wasn't necessarily linked to any larger organisation or state." He added, "I was sifting through so much misinformation. The story changed very quickly, and moment to moment."
Oliver Holmes, who once trained as a pilot, used flight tracking websites to report the incident. "Before any government has made an announcement, these platforms can tell you something seriously wrong has happened," he said. He noted that investigators will likely examine whether the sudden plunge was why the plane landed with part of its tail missing.
Taz Ali, who led the live blog, said, "Readers are making connections with what's happening in the Middle East in general, and you're trying to answer their questions, first with very scant detail and later with a deluge of information, much of which is proved to be inaccurate."
