The co-pilot who commandeered FlyDubai Flight 1073 planned to crash the aircraft into Ben Gurion Airport rather than use it purely as a hostage platform, according to an account published by American Thinker. Under interrogation, Hamam al-Hammami, an Omani national, reportedly confessed that after killing the pilot he intended to fly a routine landing approach and, in the final seconds when interception could no longer prevent it, drive the plane into the terminal.
That alleged confession, reported by the outlet, offers the clearest picture yet of why the attack unfolded the way it did — and why al-Hammami waited until the aircraft was over Jordan to strike, rather than attempting to seize the flight shortly after takeoff.
A slow approach designed to defeat interception
According to the account, al-Hammami explained his timing as deliberate. Attacking the captain only once the jet was over Jordan kept the maneuver inside a narrow window. Rather than a sudden dive, the plan reportedly called for what would look like a normal descent into Ben Gurion — a ruse meant to keep the aircraft inside the civilian air traffic pattern until it was too late for ground defenses or fighter interceptors to react.
The flight was due to land around 9:30 a.m., which would have placed it at the airport at the height of Sukkot travel. That is one of the busiest periods of the Israeli aviation calendar, with tens of thousands of travelers moving through the terminal. If the plan had succeeded, the death toll could easily have run into the thousands, according to the source’s assessment.
Al-Hammami also reportedly admitted to gathering information on previous trips to Israel — reconnaissance, the outlet suggests, that may have been aimed at identifying where a crash would claim the most lives.
The second-order damage could have outlasted the body count
The source argues that the attack’s consequences would have extended well beyond the immediate loss of life. Had the jet struck the terminal, it would have ranked as the worst attack in Israel’s history by a wide margin — a distinction the article says would have been difficult to overstate.
Equally serious, in this telling, would have been the fallout for civil aviation. Even if the physical damage at Ben Gurion could have been repaired relatively quickly, the piece contends that no airline would want to risk flying to Israel afterward. The country, still rebuilding its commercial flight connections after the war that followed October 7, 2023 — which the source notes was pockmarked by international airlines abandoning Israeli routes — would face aviation isolation more severe than anything it has experienced so far.
Tourism, described as barely hanging on after three years of conflict, would have been delivered a nearly fatal blow. And the psychological effect on a population that already lives with the daily threat of attack would have been difficult to quantify. The article acknowledges that Israelis are, by necessity, a resilient people — as the passengers and crew of Flight 1073 are said to have demonstrated — but argues that the sense of vulnerability the plot exposed is its own kind of harm.
Al Qaeda’s call to imitate
In an unsurprising follow-on, the piece points to al Qaeda’s public encouragement of copycat attacks on Israeli and American airliners. The article quotes a report describing a message in the latest edition of al-Bayan, a weekly publication launched in July by pro-al Qaeda supporters, that invoked both the September 11 attacks and what it called the attempted takeover of Flight FZ1073.
The Arabic-language article is quoted as saying that planes carrying Zionists, Americans, and others it described as enemies of Islam are still flying and can be targeted “as happened on September 11th and 30th.” It also reportedly stated that America and the Zionists have far more enemies today than before, and added a threat that “the day will come when the empire of evil America will end.”
The referenced post reportedly praised the FlyDubai figure whose social media accounts, per the same reporting, shared photos of one of the terror group’s leaders. The source frames this as predictable: rather than deterring future attackers, a high-profile attempted hijacking tends to serve as a recruitment and propaganda windfall.
The Iran question
Attention has also turned to whether Iran had a hand in the plot. President Trump has suggested it did, while noting that U.S. intelligence is still working on the question. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said it is too early to say.
The source argues that the answer matters a great deal. If Tehran were shown to be involved, it could finally convince the president that any agreement Iran signs would be a pointless deception, and could push Washington toward the kind of military action that might topple the Islamist government and, in the article’s framing, return the country to its largely pro-American population.
But the article’s larger point does not depend on the Iran question. What the plot demonstrates, it argues, is that a single determined individual can inflict damage far beyond the immediate body count — closing air corridors, wrecking an economy, and eroding a society’s sense of safety for years afterward.
The piece closes on a familiar note: that liberty is never free, that securing it requires the spending of blood and treasure, and that the price of liberty, in the phrase often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, is eternal vigilance. It is a line that this episode, whatever else it reveals, seems designed to prove.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/10/now-we-know-the-flydubai-terrorist-s-target/