An altercation on a FlyDubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv threatened to bring the plane down if not for the intervention of a representative from Northwestern’s Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement. The Center’s assistant director, Ned Kumbaya, says he was en-route to Tel Aviv to “sort out all that stuff” when he heard sounds of a fight coming from the cockpit.

“I rushed to the front of the plane when I heard some disagreement that didn’t seem very enlightened,” Kumbaya said. “When I entered, the co-pilot was stabbing the pilot and I just had to say ‘Whoa, gentlemen, slow your roll and let’s talk this out.’”

As Captain Smit Machchhar bled onto the center console and the plane’s altitude rapidly dropped, Kumbaya led the pilots in a deep breathing exercise.

“You may think that you’ll never get along now,” Kumbaya said to the co-pilot holding a bloody knife from the snack cart, “but you two are actually a lot closer than you may think.”

As passengers administered medical aid to Machchhar and off-duty pilots took over the plane’s operations, Kumbaya asked everyone to turn to their neighbor and try to describe how a bicycle doesn’t fall over, illustrating how communication can be difficult.

“At first, going into a nosedive made me really fearful for my life,” passenger Vel Ativ said. “But it doesn’t matter if that co-pilot was a terrorist, suicidal, or just nuts, I think we’ve all learned we have a lot in common.”

Kumbaya returned to Northwestern a hero and headed to court to enlightenedly disagree with his ex-wife.