Hamam al-Hammami. That's the co-pilot who tried to crash a Flydubai flight in a 9/11 style remake to kill as many Israeli's as possible. And now new details reveal exactly who al-Hammami is.
Oman Air removed Hamam al-Hammami from flight duties because of radical ideological concerns. That was the end of his career at Oman Air. It was not the end of his career in a cockpit.
Flydubai hired him and assigned him to Flight 1073 — Dubai to Tel Aviv.
Al-Hammami didn't just snap one day over Jordan. He'd been planning this for months. In June, while flying for Flydubai, he visited Ben Gurion Airport and gathered intelligence for his violent attack. He moved forward with plans in July but called it off at the last moment — because he considered himself friends with at least one crew member on that flight. Not because he had second thoughts about mass murder.
His endgame, revealed to investigators after the attack, was a sentence that should keep every aviation security official awake at night: he intended to "fly normally after killing the captain, obtain landing clearance, and then crash" into a building at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion Airport.
One hundred and seventy-four people were on Flight 1073. Twenty-seven of them were children. Four were Americans.
The background on al-Hammami reads like a case study in every warning sign that got ignored. Born in the UAE to an Omani father and Syrian mother, he worked at Oman Air for seven years before the airline pulled him from flight duties over radicalization concerns. He left in February 2025. By June 2025 he'd joined Royal Air Maroc, where he stayed until January 2026. He graduated from Buckinghamshire New University in England in 2023 with a degree in aviation management.
His deleted social media told the rest of the story. A scrubbed X account revealed what investigators described as "deeply religious and misogynistic" views. Posts from February 2022 showed him complaining that women rejected marriage proposals for refusing to wear the niqab or for wanting to keep their careers. Netanyahu confirmed investigators believe the attacker "underwent Islamist radicalization" and are examining whether external parties directed him.
The question that nobody at Flydubai has answered is the simplest one: how does a pilot removed from duties at one airline for radical ideological concerns end up in the cockpit of a commercial flight at another airline — on a route to Israel?
Oman Air saw something. They acted on it. Whatever internal flag they raised, whatever file they kept, whatever conversation happened before al-Hammami was grounded — that information existed. And either Flydubai never checked, or they checked and didn't care.
