Anatomy of Bravery: Inside the Heroic Response Aboard flydubai Flight 1073

Somewhere over north-western Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, September 30, flydubai Flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv suddenly plunged 5,000 metres before eventually landing safely at Tabuk. Although the exact circumstances of the incident are being investigated, a series of actions that averted a major disaster has awed the world.

Capt Smit Machchhar was reportedly attacked by his co-pilot. The captain, losing blood fast, fought not only for the controls but also to open the cockpit door. That allowed a handful of passengers to enter and overwhelm the attacker. One of them said he used his knowledge from air-crash documentaries to pull up the plummeting plane, while two reserve pilots rushed to land the stricken plane safely at Tabuk. A dentist-turned-emergency-medic knelt in the aisle to keep the captain alive until the ambulances came.

In the two minutes that separated life from death, the 172 people who had done nothing more heroic than buy a ticket or turn up for flight duty were sorted by circumstances into those who acted and the rest. What set them apart? It is not fearlessness. A study of bomb-disposal officers in Northern Ireland found that most experienced acute anxiety like anyone else but performed anyway. Nelson Mandela said it simply: the brave person is not the one who feels no fear, but who conquers it.

Such courage is admirable, of course, but it is not an unqualified virtue. Aristotle placed courage somewhere between cowardice and recklessness. Summoning the right amount of courage requires the right fear, in the right measure, being overcome for the right end. Thus, the flydubai responders thought themselves doomed and their courage came from instinctively trying to save themselves. The subtle distinction is with the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 in 2001, who were certainly doomed but still organised themselves to save people on the ground by forcing the 9/11 hijackers to crash the plane away from built-up Washington.

These varieties of courage – self-saving or altruistic – take their shape from circumstances. This derives from the biological evolution that drives our perception of threat and how “cornered” we feel after running out of options. Courage also comes in more than one currency. Beyond the physical type, which is costly in the present but gains medals afterwards, there is the moral kind that costs little in the moment but everything afterwards. This is the whistle-blower or dissenter who speaks truth to power, the journalist who exposes wrongdoing, or the official who reveals openly what his institution hides shamefully.

There is no hierarchy of courage as each person is brave in their own way. But courage is most useful when accompanied by competence – possession of the latter may even obligate the former. Thus, the dentist did not suddenly become brave at altitude but felt a responsibility to help because he had the skill to do so. Perhaps courage is inversely proportional to perceived helplessness, echoing the selfless actions of figures like Saman Kunan in the Thai cave rescue, or the Beirut firefighters responding to the port warehouse blaze in 2020.

Whether through the physical intervention of Abdul Aziz at a Christchurch mosque, the steadfast presence of doctors in Darfur, Sudan, or the calculated restraint of Stanislav Petrov during the 1983 false alarm, courage manifests in myriad ways. Ultimately, while some individuals may possess a higher threshold for acting courageously, everyone's threshold can be lowered through example, practice, and the infectious nature of brave deeds.