DUBAI—Hamam al-Hammami, identified by people familiar with the matter as the co-pilot on FlyDubai Flight 1073 , posted a paean to flying in a now-deleted social-media post from June 2022 written in Arabic.
“What makes aviation and flight training so beautiful is that it’s anything but routine,” the post said. “There are moments you never forget—like your very first solo flight, or your first time landing an aircraft with passengers on board.”
Investigators are now trying to understand why the Omani national took a radical turn and ended up repeatedly slashing his captain with an onboard ax before trying to crash an airliner with more than 170 people aboard, the people familiar with the investigation said.
They also want to know how he got hired by FlyDubai, those people said. His first aviation employer, state-owned Oman Air, banned him from flying after authorities became aware of his interest in browsing extremist websites, people briefed on his background said. Hammami was sent through a deradicalization program and given a desk job, but later found his way to a new job in the United Arab Emirates, they said.
Oman received no requests for information from other countries to vet him for employment, the people said. The U.A.E. and FlyDubai declined to comment while the investigation is ongoing.
The U.A.E.’s attorney general said Saturday morning that the co-pilot on Flight 1073 tried to carry out a terrorist act, echoing a conclusion drawn earlier by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and another Emirati official.
An Emirati security team brought Hammami back to the U.A.E. on Thursday morning. He is currently undergoing questioning after having been interviewed earlier in the week in Saudi Arabia, where the flight he was co-piloting made an emergency landing Wednesday after the incident.
A Saudi official briefed on the interrogation said Hammami acknowledged that he wanted to intentionally crash the plane and that he wasn’t afraid of death.
Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. and Israel have all said the co-pilot tried to bring down the jet and were looking into whether he had any links to outside powers.
Hammami, 29 years old according to the Saudi official, was born to an Omani father and Syrian mother and has long lived in Dubai, according to people familiar with the matter and his now-deleted account on X, which was verified by some of the people.
He spent time in Syria growing up during that country’s long civil war. Investigators are looking into the possibility he began to radicalize in the war-torn country where Islamist rebels fought against the ruling Assad regime, the people said.
Hammami got into aviation, studying in the U.A.E. and eventually getting a job at state-owned Oman Air.
When he was banned from flying there, he tried to get a job with Moroccan flag carrier Royal Air Maroc in 2025, according to Moroccan state media, the country’s official news agency. Royal Air Maroc didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Hammami also completed a remote-learning course in aviation management at Buckinghamshire New University, about 30 minutes west of central London, according to a spokesman for the university.
FlyDubai hired him in February this year. The U.A.E. typically conducts extensive security checks when hiring pilots. It couldn’t be determined what FlyDubai did to vet him. Oman would have shared what it knew had it been asked, the people briefed on his background said.
A trove of more than 3,000 screenshots of posts from Hammami’s deleted X account are still available on Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, a webpage-cataloging platform. They include many that reject the idea of women in the workforce and express a preference for religious women who wear the veil.
“I created a fake account pretending to be Syrian or Lebanese and contacted Saudi women,” reads a post from December 2021 in Arabic. “I was astonished by how some of them cheapen themselves by sending out their pictures.”
In another, he said he had been rejected by a woman who wanted to be a barista rather than a homemaker. “I have a rule that my wife doesn’t work,” he wrote.
Several posts, which were retrieved through Google image cache, appeared on his now-deleted Instagram account the day of this week’s attack.
One showed a trail of lights linking the holy Muslim sites of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem accompanied by a nationalist, 19th-century Arabic poem by Egyptian poet Mahmoud Sami al-Baroudi:
“My heart is steadfast, and my soul is free. It refuses disgrace, and my sword is sharp. Why, then, should a man fear the parting of his soul? Is not the end of life, after all, separation?”
Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com , Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com and Milàn Czerny at video@wsj.com
