Hamam al-Hammami, a 29-year-old Omani national with an Omani father and Syrian mother, attempted to crash flydubai flight FZ1073 — carrying more than 180 passengers, almost all Israeli — into Ben Gurion airport or a nearby high-profile target on Wednesday. Investigators now believe he originally planned the attack for July but postponed it, possibly because a friend was among the crew. The evidence of prior planning suggests Hammami may have specifically sought employment with an airline that flew to Israel. The vetting chain that allowed this is the structural story. Hammami was employed by Oman Air from 2018 to June 2025 but was moved to a desk job after concerns he had developed extremist views. He then joined Royal Air Maroc but never obtained permission to fly and left. Shortly afterward, flydubai — a state-owned airline expanding rapidly and hungry for pilots — hired him. The airline conducted criminal record checks but not radicalisation screening. Three airlines, three countries, zero functional intelligence-sharing on a pilot already flagged internally. The attack itself was crude but nearly catastrophic. Approximately two hours and 20 minutes after takeoff, Hammami used an emergency crash axe kept in the cockpit to strike captain Smit Machchhar repeatedly in the head. Machchhar, despite his injuries, managed to unlock the cockpit security door, allowing passengers to overpower Hammami. A reserve flydubai pilot aboard the flight took control and landed at a regional airport in north-western Saudi Arabia, where Saudi authorities detained the co-pilot before transferring him to UAE custody on Thursday. The digital trail is damning in retrospect. An AI-driven analysis by Accountability! recovered Hammami's deleted X account and reviewed nearly 3,000 posts, finding dozens of misogynistic posts including explicit conditional threats of physical violence against women, repeated use of slurs, and homophobic language. Nine hours after the attack, a post was made to an account in his name praising former al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and a militant responsible for a lethal suicide attack on US troops in Afghanistan in 2009. "This pilot was telling the world who he was in his posts," said Accountability! co-founder Gur Megiddo. The investigation now spans more than eight countries. Authorities in New Zealand and Australia are examining reports Hammami studied in both nations about a decade ago. Israeli authorities are pointing fingers internally — the Shin Bet says the transportation ministry was responsible for vetting passenger lists from foreign flights, while transportation minister Miri Regev says security agencies handle flight security. Israeli newspapers report that a key database of foreign pilots had not been checked despite concerns raised by official reports. The political timing intensifies every dimension of the failure. The attack occurred one week before the anniversary of the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attack and weeks before a fiercely contested Israeli general election where security failures are a central issue. Opposition leader Yair Golan called it "exactly what system collapse looks like." Netanyahu, who has built his political identity on keeping Israelis safe, claimed Hammami had undergone "radical Islamist indoctrination" and was clearly suicidal, but offered no details on how the vetting failure occurred. The core question is not whether one extremist slipped through. It is whether the international aviation vetting architecture — criminal checks without radicalisation screening, no cross-airline intelligence-sharing on flagged pilots, no systematic social media review — is structurally incapable of catching the next one. Three airlines in three countries each treated Hammami as a fresh applicant with a clean slate. That is not a bug in the system. That is the system.
