Somewhere over north-western Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, September 30, flydubai Flight 1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv suddenly plunged 5,000 metres before eventually landing safely at Tabuk. Although the exact circumstances of the incident are being investigated, a series of actions that averted a major disaster has awed the world.
Capt Smit Machchhar was reportedly attacked by his co-pilot. The captain, losing blood fast, fought not only for the controls but also to open the cockpit door. That allowed a handful of passengers to enter and overwhelm the attacker.
One of them said he used his knowledge from air-crash documentaries to pull up the plummeting plane, while two reserve pilots rushed to land the stricken plane safely at Tabuk. A dentist-turned-emergency-medic knelt in the aisle to keep the captain alive until the ambulances came.
In the two minutes that separated life from death, the 172 people who had done nothing more heroic than buy a ticket or turn up for flight duty were sorted by circumstances into those who acted and the rest. What set them apart?
It is not fearlessness. A study of bomb-disposal officers in Northern Ireland found that most experienced acute anxiety like anyone else but performed anyway. Nelson Mandela said it simply: the brave person is not the one who feels no fear, but who conquers it.
Such courage is admirable, of course, but it is not an unqualified virtue. Aristotle placed courage somewhere between cowardice and recklessness. Summoning the right amount of courage requires the right fear, in the right measure, being overcome for the right end.
Thus, the flydubai responders thought themselves doomed and their courage came from instinctively trying to save themselves. The subtle distinction is with the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 in 2001, who were certainly doomed but still organised themselves to save people on the ground by forcing the 9/11 hijackers to crash the plane away from built-up Washington.
These varieties of courage – self-saving or altruistic – take their shape from circumstances. This derives from the biological evolution that drives our perception of threat and how “cornered” we feel after running out of options.
Courage also comes in more than one currency. Beyond the physical type, which is costly in the present but gains medals afterwards, there is the moral kind that costs little in the moment but everything afterwards. This is the whistle-blower or dissenter who speaks truth to power, the journalist who exposes wrongdoing, or the official who reveals openly what his institution hides shamefully. Such courage is usually career-ending and rewarded by ostracism or worse. However, societies have often been changed for the better as a consequence.
There is no hierarchy of courage as each person is brave in their own way. But courage is most useful when accompanied by competence – possession of the latter may even obligate the former. Thus, the dentist did not suddenly become brave at altitude but felt a responsibility to help because he had the skill to do so. Perhaps courage is inversely proportional to perceived helplessness.
What about Saman Kunan, the Thai navy diver who placed his skills at the service of 12 boys he had never met and died ferrying oxygen through a flooded cave in 2018? Or the 10 Beirut firefighters who deliberately drove into danger to contain a port warehouse blaze in 2020 – and perished themselves? They did not just do their jobs but went well beyond. That is the truest form of courage and often extracts a terrible price.
But is courage still worthwhile if a person is not usefully skilled? Abdul Aziz grabbed the first thing he could find – a credit card machine – to chase a gunman out of a Christchurch mosque in 2019. His wit to improvise enabled his courage. Then there is the sheer courage of “presence”, a stubborn refusal to leave. This was seen among the doctors who stayed with their patients in an El Fasher Hospital in Darfur, Sudan last year, as murderous militiamen came in. The millions of ordinary Gazans and Ukrainians who stay or the Sudanese returning home despite continuing onslaughts are further examples. We marvel at their resilience, but this is really a kind of grim courage that helps express resistance.
It is difficult to construct a comprehensive theory of courage, but some dimensions are identifiable. Most recipients of the Carnegie Medal in the US describe their acts as “intuitive”. Courage on Flight 1073 happened in seconds or it did not happen at all. Therefore, is “deliberation” the enemy of courage?
Not necessarily. Take Stanislav Petrov, a Soviet duty officer in 1983 who saw his screens announce an American missile launch, judged it a false alarm and did nothing. His courage of restraint prevented nuclear Armageddon to earn this Encyclopaedia Brittanica tribute on his death: “He is survived by two children, two grandchildren and the entire human race.”
Meanwhile, “numbers” can submerge courage. Research on bystanders reveals that more witnesses to an emergency mean less likelihood of anyone acting. This is because when responsibility is diffused, an individual’s share is not large enough to move them. So, the planeload of people on Flight 1073 could have meant collective paralysis but what broke that spell was another aspect of courageous conduct – its infectiousness. When the bloodied captain managed to open the door, his visible courage triggered the first rescuer to act which then sanctioned the next to join, and so on.
Militaries know this and that is why they drill soldiers. This trains troops to move their reaction under fire from the part of the mind that debates risk to the part that acts. Repeat risk exposure – as done by firefighters, for example – shrinks fear while improving competence brings the confidence to shrink it further. Meanwhile, the company of colleagues expecting each other to perform so as not to let themselves down shrinks it most of all. In that sense, courage is catching.
But is courage acquired or is it inherited? Limited research suggests that genes may play a role but upbringing more so. People low in anxiety and high in empathy are likelier to intervene. And perhaps Aristotle was right in saying that we become braver by doing brave things.
That is why awards like the Carnegie Medal exist – to remind ordinary people that extraordinary things may sometimes be expected of them. That builds up a wider culture of courage in society. The traditional Arab code of muruwwa that honours the courageous rescue of distressed strangers does the same. In short, while some people may be born with a higher threshold for acting courageously, everyone’s threshold can be lowered through example and practice.
Thus, the seeds of courage, if nurtured correctly, lie ready but dormant until an environmental shift obliges them to sprout. That is how courage sprouted when the climate shifted on Flight 1073. Overwhelmed readers may wonder what they would have done if they had been on that plane. They should take heart. The seeds of courage are not rationed. They are standard issue, planted in all of us by the evolution of our common humanity.
