'30 seconds from hitting the ground': an aviation expert reads Flight FZ1073's fall for SBS News
A second, longer SBS report on the same flight, in which Penny Wong confirmed two Australians on board were safe, drew a large audience too, and the channel's daily views ran nearly five times their usual level.
SBS NewsStory of Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 95,739 views a day, 25 times a normal first day on this channel (3,778).
Dubai-Tel Aviv flight ‘30 seconds from hitting the ground’
SBS News asked an aviation consultant what the flight data showed about Flydubai flight FZ1073. His answer gave the short its title. Professor Ron Bartsch told SBS World News that the plane's rate of descent put it about 30 seconds from hitting the ground.
The flight was headed for Tel Aviv. About two hours after leaving Dubai, the captain was stabbed in the cockpit, and the aircraft dropped more than five kilometers in under a minute. Passengers have described rushing to the cockpit. With crew on board, they took back control, and the plane landed safely in Saudi Arabia.
Seventeen hours after it went up, the short had passed 82,000 views. A new SBS News short usually draws fewer than 4,000 on its first day, so this one is on course for about twenty-five times that.
The channel had already covered the flight in a longer report the same day, and that video drew a similar crowd. It adds more details. Most of the 174 passengers were Israeli. Two off-duty pilots helped take over the aircraft. Foreign Minister Penny Wong confirmed that at least two Australians were on the flight and are safe. The incident remains under investigation.
That longer report opens with the flight and then moves through the rest of the day's world news. It covers celebrations in Iraq as the last US forces left and protests in Durban against gender-based violence.
Published on Trari
Is this your channel?
Share the story with your audience: in a community post, in your channel's description or on your socials. The text and the badge are ready.
You may use the picture, the badge, and link it to this story.
- Channel
- SBS News
- Subscribers
- 651,000
- Channel views, pace per day
- 1,009,825 (on a normal day: 287,144)
- Video published
- October 1, 2026
- Video views so far
- 82,449 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 95,739
The numbers
Two reports on the same flight drew several times what a new SBS News video usually does, and they lifted the whole channel's day with them.
