On November 24, 1971, a man (who witnesses said was about 40) wearing a suit and tie and carrying a black briefcase stepped up to the Northwest Orient Airlines counter at Portland airport. He identified himself as Dan Cooper(in 1971 you didn’t even need to show identification)
Who says crime doesn't pay?
and purchased a one-way ticket on Flight 305, a 30-minute trip to Seattle, Washington, for $20.
He boarded the aircraft and took a seat in the rear of the passenger cabin. He lit a cigarette and ordered a bourbon and water. Then, he handed a stewardess a note saying that he had a bomb and was hijacking the plane. When the plane landed in Seattle, all of the passengers got off and Cooper held the flight crew and a couple of stewardesses hostage, while $200,000 and 4 parachutes were delivered to him. Right there is the genius part of his plan. If he’d asked for one parachute, they might have just delivered a bad parachute and let him jump to his death. As it was, everybody assumed his plan was to force everybody else to jump and try to escape with the plane, which probably wouldn’t have worked, as Air Force jets were on their tail the whole way. However, he shut the crew up in the cockpit and jumped himself, with the money.
He has never been caught.
Now, a lot of things have changed since 1971. Northwest Orient has been swallowed by Delta, you have to show identification and subject yourself and your luggage to all sorts of intrusive searches to get anywhere near an airplane, $20 won’t buy shit, nobody dresses up to fly any more, you wouldn’t even think of smoking on an airplane, and $200,000 is hardly worth hijacking a plane over. It reminds me of the scene in Austin Powers where the evil guy, who has come from the past, says he’s going to demand a million dollars and everybody looks at him and says “uh, dude, that’s not that much.”
But the FBI said today they think they might have a lead. Well, why the heck not.
I like watching a show on TV called Time Team in which a bunch of British Archeologists dig up an old skeleton and figure out that this was a 26 year old Viking man named Olaf who had 6 kids and liked to eat chicken, so I guess I can believe that the FBI has a clue in a case that’s only 40 years old.
In any event, Dan Cooper (probably not his real name, and the D.B. part only came about because that was one of the early suspects, who was cleared) would be in his 80s today, so I’d say he got away with it. If they solve the case now, it has historical value and nothing else.
I’d rather they were trying to figure out who killed President Kennedy. Or who planted the bombs in WTC 7.
www.gurukalehuru.com 