The news of the death of Michel Bacos, captain of Air France Flight 139 from Ben-Gurion International Airport to Paris that was hijacked with 248 passengers and 12 crew members aboard, brought me back to that nerve-wracking day, June 27, 1976.
That day, my father, may he rest in peace, promised to buy me a basketball that could only be purchased in the U.S., or in Israel at a sporting goods store at the airport. On the ground floor, one of the business class flight attendants, who knew my father, approached him and wondered what he was doing shopping at a time when "they'd hijacked one of his airplanes," and the plane that had taken off after a stopover in Athens was en route to Entebbe, not Paris.
There were no cellphones back then and my father had missed the news broadcast. From that moment on, my father was unreachable until the rescue mission on July 4, and even then, it was difficult to get ahold of him. The passenger who was killed in the heroic Entebbe rescue operation was Jean-Jacques Maimoni, who would have missed the flight if a member of the airline's ground staff – my father – hadn't helped him.
In July 2016, I was part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to Entebbe to mark the 40th anniversary of Operation Jonathan, named after his brother, Yoni, who was killed. Relatives of Jean-Jacques were also on the flight with me. I told his sister that I was very sorry my father had died two years earlier, so I couldn't tell him about meeting her.
From time to time, my father and I would talk about that flight. My father wasn't much of a talker. He was more a man of deeds. But he could spend hours talking about one person, his friend Michel Bocas. He praised him and would tell me how Bocas admired us, Israelis, whom he would always call "heroes."
Bocas never thought he deserved any prize or citation for asking his crew to stay with the Israeli passengers, whom the Arab and German terrorists separated from the rest of the passengers upon arrival in Entebbe. Later, he adopted us and we adopted him. He would mostly talk about Sorin Hershko, from the rescue team, who was badly wounded in the operation. He often visited Israel and the two even met in France. Bacos talked about Hershko as a hero and we say that Bacos was one of the heroes of Entebbe, as well.
Michel Bacos loved the sky and it loved him. On Tuesday, the heavens decided to keep him. May his memory be a blessing.
