A flight to Tel Aviv was forced to divert on Wednesday morning after suddenly dropping more than 15,000 feet.
FlyDubai Flight 1073 took off from Dubai just after 7 a.m. local time and was scheduled to land at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport about three hours later.
Around two hours into the flight, the Boeing 737 Max dropped sharply from its cruising altitude of 34,000 feet, descending to roughly 17,000 feet above sea level.
10 minutes later, the airplane squawked 7700, an internationally recognized code for general emergencies during flights.
It then changed the code to 7500, which indicates “unlawful interference” with the flight, and is the code used by pilots to indicate attempted hijackings.
It later reverted to the more general 7700 code after diverting toward Tabuk, a city in northern Saudi Arabia, about 270 miles from Tel Aviv.
The plane landed in Tabuk at 8.44 a.m. local time.
The exact nature of the incident remains unclear, but Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s national security minister, said in a post on X that there was “a terrorist who planned to crash the plane and murder the 180 Israelis on board.”
“Following concerns over an aviation incident, Prime Minister Netanyahu held consultations on the matter and is monitoring developments,” the Israeli prime minister’s office said in a statement.
“The incident is under control, and all measures are currently being deployed in order to return the Israeli passengers safely to Israel.”
