Michel Bacos, a French pilot who refused to abandon the Jewish passengers of his hijacked plane when they were taken hostage at the Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976, an ordeal that ended with one of the most daring rescue missions ever undertaken, died March 26 in Nice, France. He was 95.

Mr. Bacos, a veteran Air France pilot was the captain on Flight 139 on June 27, 1976, en route from Tel Aviv to Paris, with an intervening stop in Athens. A group of terrorists associated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a radical German group boarded the plane in Athens. Eight minutes into the flight, one of them pointed a gun at Mr. Bacos’s head, and ordered him to pilot the plane to Benghazi, Libya, for refueling, and then to Entebbe, where the passengers and crew were taken hostage. The captors separated the Jews and Israelis from the rest of the group. When the roughly 150 non-Jewish hostages were released, Mr. Bacos and his crew declined to leave.

The crisis ended when dozens of Israeli commandos stormed the airport by night, arriving in a motorcade disguised to look like that of Ugandan leader Idi Amin. Three hostages, seven terrorists and 20 Ugandan soldiers were killed in the operation. Another hostage, who had been taken to a Ugandan hospital, was later murdered.

Honors for Mr. Bacos included the Legion of Honor, his country’s highest decoration, awarded for his courage in Entebbe.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose older brother, Yonatan, was killed while serving with the Israeli commando unit that freed the hostages, wrote on Twitter: “I bow my head in his memory and salute Michel’s heroism.”