What happened over the Saudi desert is one for the books.

I started my article yesterday by noting that Israelis are happy people. I did not know that within the space of a few hours, Israelis would be singing songs of faith inside a damaged 737 jet. As with many stories, original reports on Wednesday regarding flight FZ1073 were often sketchy and wrong. One of my boys said that a FlyDubai plane had squawked 7500, which is the warning sign for a hijacking or other illegal activity on a flight. Then the signal vanished. Then we were told that it was a Russian and a Ukrainian in the cockpit, one stabbing the other. It was only a pilot altercation. It was nothing serious. Until it was something big and almost catastrophic.

The last time I was on a plane, almost a year ago, it was FlyDubai. The staff was professional and courteous. They run 10 daily flights out of Ben Gurion Airport (which the BBC called Ben Gvir Airport, since they cannot stop thinking about Israel’s tough-guy internal security minister). Years before, Turkey served as the conduit for Israelis wanting to travel — and Israelis love to travel. Direct flights often did not exist or were very expensive. Turkish Air, Pegasus and others funneled Israelis to Istanbul and Ankara, where they caught connections to points throughout the globe. Turkey dropped out after October 7, and Emirates (of which FlyDubai is a part) and Etihad jumped right in. On our flight out of Tel Aviv, we had people going to Thailand, Australia, Europe and South Africa. Emirates has — by far — the largest fleet of Airbus A380 superjumbos, so the FlyDubai 737s bring Israelis to Dubai where they fan out to their connecting flights. The more than 160 Israelis on the hijacked jet were no doubt coming home from vacations, some made in Dubai. All FlyDubai flights are canceled at this time, and for quite some time Israeli carriers have been forbidden to........

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