迪拜航空副驾驶用驾驶舱里的斧子砍伤机长，乘客冲进去救下了整架飞机

Every big airliner has an axe on board.

You may not know it, but it's right behind the pilots.

The axe is heavy; it can break open a door, or even a wall.

When something goes wrong on a plane and a door won't open, that's when you use it.

So this axe is there to save lives.

But on September 30th, someone used this axe to hurt a person.

The person he hurt was the man flying the plane with him.

That morning, a plane left Dubai, bound for Israel.

It was flight FZ1073.

迪拜 is Dubai.

以色列 is Israel.

There were 174 people on board.

The small room at the very front of the plane is called the cockpit.

The cockpit is where the pilots sit.

There were two pilots in the cockpit.

One was the captain — the captain is the person in charge of the plane.

The captain was named Smit; he had been flying planes for seventeen years.

The other sat next to the captain and helped fly the plane; he's called the co-pilot.

The co-pilot is the second pilot on the plane.

The plane had been flying for just over two hours, ten thousand meters up, and everything was fine.

Then the co-pilot picked up that axe.

He attacked the captain with it.

The captain collapsed to the floor, covered in blood.

What was the co-pilot trying to do?

He wanted to make the plane fall.

To fall means to go down and down from somewhere very high, until you hit the ground.

He wanted none of the 174 people on board to make it home.

And the plane really did start to fall.

In two minutes, it dropped five thousand meters.

The passengers sitting in the back didn't know what was happening.

乘客 means the people riding the plane — passengers.

All the passengers could feel was that the plane was dropping far too fast; something was very wrong.

Many of them were terrified.

But the cockpit door was shut.

After 2001, this door on planes changed.

The cockpit door is special: people outside can't open it, only people inside can.

The captain lay on the floor, badly wounded.

He said later that he thought: I'll use the last of my strength to open the door.

力气 is the thing in your body that lets you do things.

When you're tired, you have no strength left.

With the last of his strength, the captain opened the door.

The moment the door opened, several passengers rushed in.

One of them was an ordinary Israeli worker.

He grabbed the co-pilot and dragged him out of the cockpit.

Other passengers came to help, and together they pinned the co-pilot to the floor.

But now, who would fly the plane?

The captain was hurt and couldn't fly.

The co-pilot was the attacker — he couldn't be allowed to fly.

By sheer luck, there were two more people on board who could fly a plane.

They weren't working that day; they were passengers too.

The two of them went straight into the cockpit and started flying the plane.

The plane stopped falling.

Twelve minutes later, at about 4,500 meters, the plane was flying normally again.

Meanwhile, there was also a dentist on the plane.

A dentist is a doctor who looks after teeth.

This dentist stayed by the captain's side and stopped his bleeding.

The plane didn't go to Israel.

It diverted to Saudi Arabia instead.

沙特 is Saudi Arabia.

Eighty-five minutes later, the plane landed safely in Saudi Arabia.

Of the 174 passengers, not one was seriously hurt.

The captain was badly injured, but he survived.

Only afterwards did people learn the co-pilot was from Oman.

阿曼 is Oman, a country very close to Dubai.

He used to work for an airline in Oman.

That airline found out he had dangerous ideas.

Dangerous means something could hurt people, or something terrible could happen.

So that airline had already stopped letting him fly.

In 2024, he left that company.

But later, this airline in Dubai let him fly again.

Now several countries are asking: why was a man with dangerous ideas back in a cockpit?

That axe was meant to save lives.

That day, a man used it to hurt someone.

But a wounded captain, a few passengers who ran in, two off-duty pilots and a dentist together saved all 174 people on this plane.

Think about it: if you were on this plane, would you run into the cockpit?