San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Michel Bacos — pilot celebrated for refusing to abandon hostages
Michel Bacos, the valiant French pilot who was forced by terrorists to fly his jetliner to Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976, but refused to abandon Jewish passengers before an audacious rescue by Israeli commandos, died Tuesday in Nice, France. He was 94.
His death was announced by Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, where Bacos lived.
“Michel bravely refused to surrender to anti-Semitism and barbarism and brought honor to France,” Estrosi said. “Michel was a hero.”
Celebrated in films and books, the swashbuckling rescue by Israelis disguised as Ugandan soldiers culminated a harrowing week in which hijackers from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Germany’s BaaderMeinhof Gang seized control of Air France Flight 139 less than eight minutes after it lifted off from Athens on June 27, 1976. The plane had stopped there on its way from Tel Aviv to Paris.
The plane, carrying more than 240 passengers and a crew of 12, was diverted to Libya to refuel, then directed to fly more than 3,500 miles to Entebbe, where it landed with only 20 minutes of fuel remaining.
Three days later, the hijackers freed the 148 passengers who were neither Jewish nor Israeli. They threatened to kill the rest unless 53 prisoners being held in Israel and other countries on terrorism charges were released. The plane’s crew was also permitted to depart. “There was no way we were going to leave — we were staying with the passengers to the end,” Bacos (pronounced bahCOSE) told the Israeli website Ynetnews.com in 2016. “This was a matter of conscience, professionalism and morality. As a former officer in the Free French Forces, I couldn’t imagine leaving behind not even a single passenger.”
As he recounted to the BBC that year, “I told my crew that we must stay until the end, because that was our tradition, so we cannot accept being freed. All my crew agreed without exception.”
Three planeloads of troops from the Israel Defense Forces carried out the rescue operation on the night of July 4. Three of the remaining 106 passengers and one Israeli commando, Lt. Col. Yonatan Netanyahu, were killed. He was the elder brother of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.
Netanyahu tweeted this week that Bacos had “stayed with the hostages through all their hardships, until IDF soldiers — led by my brother Yoni — freed him in a daring operation.”
“I bow my head in his memory,” he added, “and salute Michel’s bravery.”
Bacos, who was 52 at the time, recalled in interviews that the ordeal started with a commotion that he could hear through the cockpit door.
“Eight minutes after the takeoff from Athens, I heard noise in the passenger cabin, then screams,” he said. “First I thought there was a fire on board. The chief engineer opened the door of the pilot’s cabin and found himself nose to nose with the chief hijacker, a German, armed with a pistol and a grenade.”
“If you stay still and do nothing suspicious,” Bacos quoted the German as saying, “no one will be hurt.”
The hijacker “had his gun pointed continuously at my head and occasionally he would poke my neck not to look at him,” Bacos said.
“We could only obey the orders of the terrorists,” he added.
After the plane landed in Uganda, Bacos insisted on his right, as the pilot, to visit all the hostages. They included a pharmacist, a doctor, a welder, a teacher, a gas station owner, a lawyer, a microbiologist, an economist, a nurse, a computer engineer and at least one woman who had survived the Holocaust. All were being held in a dusty, derelict passenger terminal.
Seven terrorists and 20 Ugandan soldiers were also killed in the raid when a convoy of Israeli commandos arrived in darkness disguised as a motorcade carrying Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator who had welcomed the hijackers.
“I lifted my head, and I saw a soldier dressed like a member of the Ugandan army with a white hat, and he said in Hebrew: ‘Listen, guys, we’ve come to take you home,’ ” Bacos, who had often flown the Israel route and understood the language, told the BBC.
“I didn’t believe what I was seeing,” he added. “Even now I can’t describe it — seeing the soldier. It was as if an angel had come down from the sky.”
Returning to Israel in their military transport plane, the commandos fetched Bacos from the cabin. “Your place is not here,” he recalled a soldier telling him, “but in the cockpit.”
Michel Bacos was born on May 3, 1924, in Egypt, where his father worked at the Suez Canal. France had been the majority stockholder in the canal corporation.
Michel joined the Free French Forces as a teenager during World War II and was stationed in Morocco as a naval aviation officer.
“I fought the Nazis,” he said. “I knew precisely what fascism was all about. The genocide is a horror that none of us had forgotten.”
In the 1960s, he ferried passengers and supplies between West Berlin and West Germany, where he met his wife, Rosemary, a flight attendant. She survives him along with their three sons and many grandchildren.
Bacos retired from Air France in 1982.
He was decorated for bravery with France’s National Order of the Legion of Honor. He was also honored by Israel, B’nai B’rith International and the American Jewish Committee.
He was played by Eddie Constantine in the 1977 television movie “Raid on Entebbe” and by Brontis Jodorowsky in the 2018 feature film “7 Days in Entebbe.”
Bacos allowed himself a two-week break after the hijacking. But once back from vacation, he requested a specific destination for his first flight: Tel Aviv.