The Flydubai incident reveals how an event whose investigation is still incomplete can turn into a political and media story; the “plumber” narrative moves from Netanyahu to Trump, while the public receives an image of the event before its truth becomes clear

Prepared and Analyzed by | Strategic Media Department – BETH Agency
Supervised by: Abdullah Al-Amirah

The Flydubai aircraft incident did not need much time before it left the cockpit and turned into a battle of narratives.

The official Saudi information was specific and clear: the preliminary investigations established that the first officer assaulted the captain, injuring both of them, after which the flight made an emergency landing in Tabuk. As for the motive and background, they remained under investigation.

But the political narrative elsewhere moved faster.

In Israel, the terrorism hypothesis was raised early on, then Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of the first officer having been subjected to “extremist Islamic indoctrination,” despite saying at another stage that it was still too early to determine who was behind the incident, while the investigations had not yet established any link to Iran or an organized group.

Then came the plumber story.

The narrative relayed by Netanyahu says that an Israeli passenger who works as a plumber entered the cockpit, pushed the attacker away, took hold of the controls, and helped correct the aircraft’s position, drawing on what he had seen in a television program about air disasters.

The passenger himself spoke about his intervention inside the cockpit, while later accounts indicated that supporting pilots on board the aircraft were the ones who took control of the flight.

When the narrative reached Donald Trump, he retold it with clear astonishment, but placed before it one highly significant sentence:

“I don’t know if it’s true.”

He also stopped short of asserting that the first officer had intended to bring the aircraft down, explaining that this was the account that had reached him from Netanyahu and others.

It was not outright mockery so much as a clear distance between the person relaying the story and full belief in it.

What is striking here is Netanyahu’s keenness to relay the account himself to Trump quickly, before the investigations were complete.

At the same time, other narratives and questions began to scatter, in the absence of a complete picture of what had happened, among them one highly sensitive question:

Could another party have planned the incident, or sought to exploit it politically and in the media?

This is precisely where the problem of the early narrative appears:

The longer the investigation takes, the wider the space for interpretation becomes, and the information vacuum turns into an ideal environment for questions and hypotheses; some are open to examination, while others may simply be extensions of the battle of narratives.

The circumstances may be disclosed in full, or part of them may remain outside public circulation.

In such complex cases, a common investigative principle comes to the fore:

Follow the beneficiary.

Not because the beneficiary is necessarily an accused party, but because this can serve as an entry point for understanding the network of interests, and who benefited politically, in the media, or in security terms from the occurrence of the event or from the way it was presented to public opinion.

Here an important question arises:

Why did this incident attract all this commotion, and this number of narratives, so quickly?

The most plausible answer is that the incident brought together, in a single moment, highly sensitive elements: an aircraft bound for Israel, an incident inside the cockpit, an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, Israeli passengers, the circumstances of an open regional war, and political leaders who entered the narrative early.

These elements alone are enough to turn any information vacuum into an arena of competition over how to interpret the event before the investigation is complete.

Here the most important question is no longer only:

Who created the narrative?

But rather:

Who benefited from getting it into the public mind first?

At this point, the issue becomes bigger than Flydubai.

In sudden events, the public does not wait for the investigation to conclude. The information vacuum quickly needs a story: a hero, an attacker, a reason, and a motive.

The more dramatic narrative has a clear advantage: ease of recall and circulation.

Research in cognitive psychology indicates that repetition increases the likelihood that recipients will feel that information is true, even when repetition provides no new evidence; this is known as the “illusory truth effect.” A broad analysis covering 182 studies confirmed that repetition does indeed increase the perceived truthfulness of information.

More difficult still, later correction does not always erase the initial effect. The first piece of information may remain present in the public’s interpretation of the event even after people learn that it was inaccurate, a phenomenon studies describe as the continued influence of misinformation.

This is where the power and danger of the early narrative lie together.

The investigation looks for what happened.

The narrative often looks for the story people can remember.

And when the story arrives first, the truth later has to do more than prove itself:

It has to reclaim its place from a narrative that reached the public mind before it did.

And this may be the most important lesson from the Flydubai incident:

In the age of media flow, the battle is not always over the truth alone.. but over who reaches the memory first.