A video circulating online claims to show “terrifying footage” from the Israel-bound Flydubai flight on which a pilot was reportedly stabbed. It shows a plane descending over a built up area as passengers are heard screaming.
The attack on the Flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv did prompt an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, but this footage does not show it. The clip appears to show a different Flydubai plane flying over Dubai. And the audio isn’t from the incident either—it’s from a third, separate flight four years ago that experienced turbulence over South America.
One X post with over 700,000 views sharing the video said: “A passenger reportedly captured dramatic footage from the window of the Flydubai aircraft during the incident.”
As pointed out by Open Source Intelligence investigator Tal Hagin, the visuals appear to show a Flydubai plane flying over Dubai, not Saudi Arabia, so could not show the claimed incident.
We know from tracking data that the flight the attack occurred upon took off in Dubai before steeply descending over Saudi Arabia, along the border of Jordan, before making an emergency landing in Tabuk, in the northwest of Saudi Arabia.
The video was edited to combine footage of a plane flying over Dubai with audio taken from an unrelated video of turbulence on a flight over the Andes, filmed in 2022. The audio in the edited clip starts from 0:11 of the original.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said one unnamed pilot stabbed the other, Captain Smit Machchhar, on flight FZ1073 on 30 September. The Indian embassy in the UAE said on Thursday Captain Machchhar was “in good health and recovering well”.
[Warning: very graphic imagery] Verified footage of the incident includes content showing passengers with blood-stained clothing, videos from inside the aircraft as the incident began to unfold and of passengers relating what happened.
How do we know the video shows a flight flying over Dubai?
The ground features indicate the aircraft in the clip was over Dubai creek, not Tabuk. Notable features include what appears to be the Hyatt Regency Dubai hotel with a distinctive disc-shaped structure on its roof in the first three seconds, and the Infinity Bridge road with its split carriageway.
Tabuk Airport isn’t close to a body of water either, and one is clearly visible in the video.
Misleading images and videos can spread quickly in the aftermath of major incidents. Our toolkit can help you assess whether shared footage is real, edited or has been taken out of context.
