Flydubai passenger Mika Bauman described chaos aboard the flight that was diverted to Saudi Arabia, as children cried and passengers screamed.
“We just felt the plane drop completely and start spinning a little, and everyone was screaming, there were children crying,” she told CNN at Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport.
“I was just sure I was going to die,” she said, comparing the feeling of the plane losing altitude to that of a drop on a roller coaster. “It was that times a million.”
She said she felt helpless as the chaos unfolded and the plane dropped.
“You’re just sitting there and accepting your fate.”
Bauman described seeing people going down the aisle with blood-stained clothes, and at first thinking something was wrong with the plane.
“Someone kept coming up and updating us and then they told us there’s a terrorist on board,” she said, adding that she didn’t know the full extent of what happened until the plane finally landed in Saudi Arabia.
“They told us it was going to be a rough landing too, so we had to set ourselves up for that,” Bauman said.
Like many others, Bauman was terrified of boarding another Flydubai flight put on to repatriate passengers from Saudi Arabia back to Tel Aviv, but with the encouragement of her parents who were waiting for her at Ben Gurion and assured her of its safety, Bauman boarded the plane.
“It was a very scary flight here even though it was only 40 minutes,” she said.
Bauman said she later thanked the hero passengers who subdued the attacker, saying they were easy to recognize because of the blood on their clothes.
“They just said that they knew their family was on that plane and if they didn’t rush in then we wouldn’t be here right now, so they really saved our lives,” she said of those passengers.