Here is the state of the facts, as reported. On September 27, as a FlyDubai flight approached Tel Aviv, its co-pilot allegedly attacked the captain with a cockpit emergency ax. Passengers and crew subdued him, and an off-duty flight crew aboard the jet made a safe emergency landing in Saudi Arabia; Israeli investigators believe he acted as a lone wolf. CBS News reported that multiple sources familiar with the investigation identified him as Hamam al Hamami, an Omani national, and that an Israeli security official said authorities were examining whether the incident was an attempted September 11-style terror attack.
What CBS adds now is what al Hamami was saying before all of this. On an X account, since deleted, he wrote and shared posts between November 2021 and late October 2022 that drew heavily on the vocabulary of the so-called manosphere. CBS found archived versions. “No matter how much you grovel or ‘lick their feet,’ you can forget about ever being with them; you chose the cheap, easy route to approach the opposite sex instead of elevating your own value as a man,” he wrote in one, originally in Arabic. Another used the manosphere term “simp” for a man who “hangs around feminist circles,” ending: “The only woman whose feet I would kiss is my mother.”
The Financial Times reported Wednesday that its own investigation turned up some 3,000 misogynistic messages posted or shared by al Hamami, including calling women “rotten meat,” the assertion that a woman’s “only obligation is to lift her legs,” and that women seeking divorce deserve “a good thrashing.” CBS notes it has not independently reviewed all of the posts the FT cites. Among the details in the FT’s haul, per CBS: al Hamami praised flying as “the safest means of public transport.”
The posts mixed manosphere rhetoric with extremist interpretations of Islam. The only woman he described positively was his mother, whom he credited with raising her children “on religion, morals, and virtue.” In January 2022, nearing 25, he described hoping to marry and move out of his parents’ home; according to the FT he turned to a Muslim dating site seeking a “religious Saudi from a tribal background” between 18 and 23 who would wear a face cover, not work outside the home, and live abroad. The search failed, from which he concluded that most women “care primarily about money” and are “skilled at pretense.” One post seen by CBS was openly threatening: he wrote that he would “stamp on your head, wipe the floor with you, make you an example to others, and then release you.” It isn’t clear whether that was aimed at a particular person.
The reference check that wasn’t
Here is the part that is less about one man’s posts and more about a system. Sources told CBS that al Hamami entered new-pilot training at Oman Air, where Omani government surveillance discovered he was visiting radical websites. Oman Air pulled him off the flight deck and moved him to an office job; one source said he resigned and left the airline around 2024. At some point he posted a video of El Al planes in Dubai that ended with a photo of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the al Qaeda leader believed to have helped plan the September 11 attacks, who was killed in a US drone strike in 2022.
Then he moved to Dubai, and FlyDubai hired him — without, the sources say, vetting him with the Omani government. Which is to say: the previous employer had already done the hard part. It had found the problem, acted on it, and taken him out of the cockpit. The only remaining step was for the next employer to make a phone call, and per the reporting, that call never happened. CBS notes it remains unclear how he came to be flying passengers to Tel Aviv at all, including the unresolved question of whether an Omani national should have been cleared for the route.
Al Hamami is now in the United Arab Emirates, being interrogated by Israeli and Emirati authorities. Prime Minister Netanyahu told Fox News that Israel learned through questioning that he “underwent Islamist radical indoctrination,” that he was “suicidal,” and that after passengers and crew subdued him he shouted: “Kill me, kill me!” President Trump, a couple of days after the incident, floated a link to Iran — “based on what I’m hearing” — though Israeli investigators, per CBS, currently see a lone actor.
Airlines run on layered safety: checklists, redundancies, two pilots per cockpit partly so one can stop the other. The layer that failed here was the cheapest one in aviation — a background check. The information existed, an institution had already organized it, and it traveled exactly one job change before getting lost. That is usually how this kind of failure looks from the inside: not a secret that was impossible to find, but a file nobody was responsible for opening.