The 1972 attack is a reminder that the most dangerous threats can come from within an institution. And the 1989 Toronto solar event remains an underappreciated warning about how exposed modern digital infrastructure is to cosmic weather.
There are bad flights, and then there is 16 August 1972, when King Hassan II of Morocco boarded his Boeing 727 and found himself intercepted by six of his own air force’s F-5 fighters over the Atlantic.
The pilots opened fire. Crew members were killed. The aircraft was hit. By any reasonable measure, this should have been the end of Hassan II.
It was not.
The King Gets on the Radio
What allegedly happened next is the sort of thing that would earn a sceptical look from a fiction editor. Hassan, according to the story, got on the radio himself and talked the attacking pilots into standing down. How exactly he managed it, history does not fully illuminate. That is, characteristically, the most interesting part.
He landed. He survived. He then moved with considerable speed: arrests and executions followed, and General Oufkir, a senior figure connected to the plot, died in circumstances described as suicide and believed by almost nobody to be exactly that. Hassan went on to rule Morocco for another 27 years.
It is an extraordinary account of a man who, when everything went catastrophically wrong at altitude, concluded that his best survival tool was his own voice.
Two More from the Sixteenth of August
This episode does not stop there. We also visit 1550, when Rabbi Moses Isserles ruled on a dispute between Venetian printers competing over editions of the Talmud. The decision is considered one of the earliest recorded copyright rulings, which means arguments about intellectual ownership have a considerably longer history than anyone arguing about streaming rights might suppose.
Then there is 1989, when a solar particle event interfered with computer systems at the Toronto Stock Exchange and forced trading to halt. No villain, no drama: just the sun going about its business. Part of a broader year of heightened solar activity, the incident highlighted how fragile digital infrastructure remains in the face of cosmic weather. The lesson has not exactly been acted on.
Why Listen?
Three stories, one calendar date: a king who survived by talking, a rabbi who drew one of the earliest legal lines around intellectual property, and a star that quietly knocked out a stock exchange. This episode is about nerve, improvisation, and the persistent human talent for getting through days that had no business ending well.
Ten minutes. Worth your time.