Miryam Shira Ohayon gave her testimony via a speakerphone held up by her waiting mother at Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv.
"It (the plane) was really about to crash. It was only thanks to the ingenuity of several people that they managed to take control of the co-pilot and render him harmless," she says, according to AFP.
Other passengers told various Israeli media outlets how they helped overpower the attacker. Photos taken by passengers after the commotion show the plane's interior covered in blood, an injured pilot and another tied to the floor.
"Everyone on the plane is safe, except for the pilot. We need help," a passenger with blood on his face says in a video clip recorded in the air.
Long fight
According to several witnesses, three passengers rushed to the cockpit to stop the knife attack, and pilots from the airline Flydubai who were not on duty were able to intervene and bring the plane down to the ground.
One of the three men being hailed as heroes, Tzika Manes, told Israel's Keshet 12 that his wife had heard screams from the cockpit. When a flight attendant checked the situation, the attacked pilot fell out the door while the co-pilot tried to stab him.
After the plane plummeted around 5,000 meters, it took Tzika Manes over 20 minutes of struggle to wrestle the co-pilot down and tie him up with headphone cords.
Felt like September 11th
Still others gave similar accounts of the events.
"It felt like an eternity, but it lasted maybe two minutes when the plane went down. Then it felt like everything was over, that it was September 11 again," says passenger Daniel, referring to the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001.
But the worries didn't end when the attacker was seemingly neutralized, he told The Times of Israel. Passengers initially didn't know who the two pilots who eventually regained control of the plane were.
"The pilots locked themselves in the cockpit and we had no contact with them. All sorts of thoughts went through my head, but when we heard the pilot talking to us again and telling us they were going to land the plane, I calmed down," he says.
