The Indian pilot of the FlyDubai aircraft that was nearly hijacked on Wednesday gave his account of what happened in the cockpit that day. 

Captain Smit Machchhar told Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday that he had been stabbed repeatedly, but crawled to the cockpit door to pop the latch, allowing Israelis aboard the flight to stop the attack. 

“I was fighting for my life. I had suffered so many wounds that I had fallen down. … But when I was lying down there, I could hear that the aircraft was going down. I knew absolutely that this was one last push, if Smit could do it," Machchhar, a 17-year-veteran pilot, said in the interview, the Daily Wire reported. 

While the attacker was still stabbing him, he said he "just opened" the door and others came in. Machchhar added that, as he lay bleeding on the cabin floor, he turned to his Hindu faith for strength.

During the flight on Wednesday, a knife-carrying pilot flying the commercial flight tried to stab a fellow pilot, resulting in the jet plummeting roughly 16,000 feet before making an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia, according to multiple news reports.