He thought at first that this was simply because of an air pocket, but “it took a lot of time, almost a minute”.
Everyone who had not been seated fell to the floor, the 40-year-old said.
“After a couple of seconds, we started to hear screams. ‘There is blood, there is stabbing, we need help’,” Polovincik said.
“At the end of the day, you understand very, very quickly that literally there is nothing that you can do at this point in time,” he said.
Polovincik, a performance marketing analyst, said he tried to “be cool” for his children.
“You just tell them, yeah, everything’s going to be all right. It’s just a malfunction in the aeroplane, there is a crew under control, the passengers are helping them, [you] hug them really hard and try to keep your face so it doesn’t look very panicked, try to keep your tone of voice.”
But he said there was naturally a “high degree of panic” on the flight.
There were lots of families with children on the plane because the flight took place towards the end of a Jewish holiday period.
After about 10 to 15 minutes, he said a passenger in the cockpit told them the incident was “under control” and other staff were flying the plane.
In a video released by Netanyahu’s office, passenger Yaniv Hayun described putting the attacker in a chokehold and pulling him out of the cockpit before other passengers helped pin him down.
Two other pilots who were onboard the flight then took over the controls and safely landed the plane, which had been carrying more than 150 passengers.
Polovincik said: “After they told us that the situation is, again, ‘under control’, then it was a bit harder to tell the kids that it’s malfunctioned because people start to walk around the aeroplane covered with blood.”
Polovincik was praised Indian pilot, Capt Smit Machchhar, who fought off his attacker and opened the door to the cockpit, allowing passengers to step in.
“Without him opening the door, we’re probably not speaking here right now,” he said, adding that he “can’t even start saying our gratitude for this human being”.
Polovincik said that, although he was not religious, he could not escape “the feeling that it was the hand of God yesterday” that had put “the pieces on the board in the way that they did”.
“It’s remarkable.”
