In the wake of the mid-air flight scare on Wednesday aboard the flydubai FZ1073, a Canadian TV show from 2003 is now going viral again.
This comes after Yaniv Hayun, one of the Israeli passengers who burst into the cockpit amid the fight between the flight's Indian captain, Smit Machchhar—and the Omani co-pilot who had stabbed him—to correct the aircraft from its steep nosedive.
Hayun later told Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu that he used to watch the docuseries Air Crash Investigation, also known as Mayday, which gave him the idea to pull back the control stick of the aircraft that made it level.
The docuseries blends dramatic reconstructions of tense situations in cockpits and passenger cabins using interviews, investigation reports, and animations, in order to break down aviation incidents in detail.
Notably, one of the episodes in the show even has a connection to flydubai.
Holding Pattern, the first episode of season 22 of the show, even talks about flydubai flight 981 nosediving into the runway of Russia's Rostov-On-Don International Airport on March 19, 2016 under severe weather conditions, which eventually led to the plane crashing, and the deaths of all 62 passengers and crew members onboard.
However, another episode offered a chilling look at what might have happened if the Wednesday flight to Israel had crashed instead of landing safely at the Tabuk Airport in Saudi Arabia.
This is Cockpit Killer, the ninth episode from season 20, which deals with the LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 disappearing from the radar and later crashing in Namibia with 33 people on board.
After ruling out technical malfunction and other potential factors, the investigators reached a harsh conclusion: that the culprit was the captain, who had deliberately crashed the flight.
Episodes like those also put forth a question: cockpit doors are reinforced to prevent attackers from getting in, but what happens when the threat is inside the cockpit?
In any case, it must be noted that the show is no replacement for flight school, and that those who later brought the aircraft down for a landing were off-duty professional pilots.
Yet, what makes the TV connection interesting is that the Wednesday incident might be one of the first cases where a docuseries taking aviation incidents from report to screens becomes part of another aviation incident—a full circle.
