Smit-ten: World in love with heroic Indian pilot who saved Israelis and beat social media hijacking

TOI correspondent from Washington: The old saying that lies go halfway across the world before truth gets its shoes on was on full display in the hours after the Fly Dubai hijacking episode. What began as a genuine mid-air emergency on flydubai Flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv rapidly spawned a swirl of inaccurate claims, misidentifications, and social-media distortions, and it wasn’t until Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went public with details of the heroic act by the pilot, Capt Smit Macchchar, whom he clearly identified as Indian, that the world began to acknowledge an…

Even US President Donald Trump briefly acknowledged the bravery of the pilot before digressing into a vivid description of how the attacker was taken down by Israeli passengers. “The pilot, in bad shape, had the sense to open the door!” Trump said, calling him a “hero” and adding, “it seems as though the copilot was perhaps a terrorist or perhaps a whack job”.