Harger: Twenty-seven kids on a diving Flydubai 737 MAX got home safe. Thank a Boeing worker in Renton

I talked with aviation analyst John Nance on Wednesday. You’ve seen him on TV and heard him on the radio every time a plane goes down. When he wasn’t doing interviews, John flew full-time for two airlines before he retired. He’s deadly serious, and he pulls no punches.

And something he told me made me proud to live and work in the Puget Sound area.

John doesn’t like the word “hero.”

“I get really upset,” he told me, “when people start throwing the word ‘hero’ around, because there are times that it actually does apply.”

He thinks this may be one of those times.

Flydubai Flight 1073: A cockpit stabbing and a terrifying dive

Earlier this week, a Flydubai jet headed from Dubai to Tel Aviv nearly went down. Officials said the co-pilot stabbed the captain and tried to crash the plane.

Depending on whose flight tracking data you read, the plane dropped somewhere between 14,000 and 17,000 feet in under a minute. John wants to see more details before he believes it.

“Nobody has seen the flight data recorder.”

What he does see worries him. The plane may have hit, or gone a little past, the speed of sound in that dive. On swept-wing jets like the 737, that’s where things get ugly. Early airliners were lost to dives they couldn’t pull out of. Others lost their tails trying.

Photos already show the rudder chewed up, likely by what engineers call “flutter,” a violent vibration you only get when a plane goes much faster than it should.

“Incredibly improbable,” John called it, that this airplane came back.

How passengers got into the cockpit of the Flydubai 737 MAX

You may have heard that passengers broke down the cockpit door. John says that’s not how it works. After 9/11, those doors were built so nobody can break them down.

His best guess: the wounded captain, Smit Machchhar, managed to get a finger on the button that unlocks the door from inside.

Passengers and cabin crew poured in and pinned the co-pilot to the floor. One of them, Yaniv Hayun, is a plumber by trade. With the plane diving, he grabbed the yoke and pulled back. He credits years of watching “Air Crash Investigation” on TV.

Then two off-duty pilots in the back stepped in, took over, and landed the plane in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

“Somebody had it out for everybody on that airplane, including themselves,” John said, “and they were not allowed to carry it forward.”

The Boeing 737 MAX that held together

There are other heroes in this story. Thousands of them. Some of them may be reading this right now.

That plane was a Boeing 737 MAX.

Every 737 is finished in Renton, and since this summer, in Everett, too. When I asked John about the men and women who build them, he brought up an old bumper sticker that wore out on his car: “If it’s not Boeing, I’m not going.”

“It doesn’t mean that Airbus builds bad airplanes,” he said. “It means that Boeing builds incredibly tough airplanes.”

During certification, John said, Boeing practically doubles how far the wings have to flex. “They overbuild these airplanes. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen one that was quite as stressed as this one may have been.”

This plane may never fly again. But 174 people walked off it, 27 of them kids.

Boeing earns scrutiny. It also earned this one

It’s easy to dunk on Boeing when something goes wrong. I spent many years reporting on problems inside the company, so I’m not coming at this with rose-colored glasses.

But even with that scrutiny, step back and look at the bigger picture.

The National Safety Council says your lifetime odds of dying in a car crash are 1 in 101. For airline passengers, there were too few deaths in 2024 to even calculate the odds.

Boeing makes a damn good airplane. The company learns from its mistakes. And the people who work there are gutted when something goes wrong. They take it personally.

Boeing workers in Renton and Everett: Heroes

So yes, that’s what you are. Heroes. The men and women in the plants and shops all across Western Washington. Your skill, your dedication to quality, the way you take it personally. That saved lives this week.

Twenty-seven children are alive because of your care and exacting work.

You should be proud of that. If you’re headed into work at Boeing this morning, know that what you do matters. You built a plane so well that it survived what would otherwise have been a disaster.

Now, if you could just talk to the airlines about legroom in economy…

Seriously. Heroes. We’re lucky to have you.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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