The most extraordinary part of the flight was not simply that passengers fought back against an attacker. It was that, in the seconds when a passenger aircraft began plunging toward the ground, one ordinary traveller remembered something he had once watched on television.

Yaniv Hayun, 50, was flying with his wife and two daughters when chaos suddenly erupted aboard flydubai flight FZ1073, carrying more than 170 people toward Tel Aviv.

Then came a scream.

A woman shouted that someone had been stabbed. The aircraft shook. Hayun rushed toward the cockpit—and saw the plane beginning to dive.

Inside, the captain had been stabbed by the co-pilot. The cockpit door was apparently opened, allowing Hayun and another passenger to enter. With the aircraft in danger and the situation rapidly deteriorating, several passengers confronted the attacker.

Hayun grabbed the co-pilot and pulled him away from the controls, while other passengers helped restrain him. Tzvika Manes later said airline earphones were used to tie the attacker down.

But stopping the assault was only half the battle.

The aircraft still needed to be brought under control.

With the controls momentarily unattended, Hayun returned to the cockpit and pulled up the steering control, helping stop the aircraft’s dangerous descent. Another crew member eventually took control, and the plane was safely landed in Saudi Arabia.

When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu later asked Hayun how he knew what to do, his answer was almost surreal.

“I watch Air Crash Investigation, Mr Prime Minister.”

A television programme had given him a fragment of knowledge that, in an unimaginable emergency, became useful.

Hayun has since been nominated for Israel’s Presidential Award for Civilian Heroism, alongside several other passengers involved in the rescue: Manes, his wife Tali, doctor Shota Musaev and passenger Asaf Rajuan.

Yet Hayun rejects the language of heroism.

Rajuan does too.

Speaking after landing, he explained that when your family is in danger, there may be no time to think about courage, recognition or consequences.

You simply move.

That may be the most striking lesson from the flight: sometimes extraordinary acts begin with ordinary people refusing to freeze when everything around them is falling apart.