#skyjacking

With the world’s attention focused on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, a retired El Al pilot, a veteran of five armed hijacking attempts and plots, including one movie-worthy standoff at 29,000 feet, splashed some local brandy into his afternoon tea.

“When you don’t know, you just don’t know,” Uri Bar-Lev said of the fate of the airliner, speaking two weeks after it dropped off the radar.

Then, while he was folding the Hebrew paper, which was splayed open to the MH370 story of the day, came an endearingly familiar routine, the ritual dance performed by so many Israelis of Bar-Lev’s 1948 generation: Why do you want to hear this story? What’s so special about it? It’s been told before. Haven’t you read it? Why would people want to hear it now?

The Times of Israel mentioned the missing plane and hinted at his heroics. We said there might be a lesson to be learned or simply a tale worth re-telling. He waved his hand dismissively, but, fresh from Pilates and in a rush to finish his chores before setting off for Chile the next day to visit a newborn grandson, the 83-year-old pilot agreed to deliver the abridged version of events.

On September 6, 1970, Bar-Lev, who had flown as a 16-year-old in the 1948 War of Independence and later during the 1956 War, was picked up from his Amsterdam hotel and brought to Schiphol airport to fly the second leg of El Al Flight 219 from Tel Aviv to New York. Before take-off, El Al’s security officer on duty at the airport told the pilot that there were four suspicious people seeking to board the flight. Two held Senegalese passports with consecutive numbers; two others, a couple, carried less suspicious looking Honduran passports, but all had ordered their tickets at the last minute.

Bar-Lev, in consultation with the security officer, barred the Senegalese passengers from boarding and demanded that the local security officers closely inspect the two Honduran nationals before allowing them to board.

Although at the time he did not know that no such inspection had been performed, he stopped at seat 2C and had a chat with Avihu Kol, one of the two armed security officers on the plane. “I told him, I want you in the cockpit with me,” Bar-Lev said.

Kol was alone in first class. He might as well have been wearing a sign that said air marshal. “Someone could just come up behind him and shoot him in the head,” Bar-Lev said, recalling that Kol had warned him about just such a scenario two weeks before.