A Ticket Bought with Cash
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Public domain. Picture source
On the day before Thanksgiving 1971, a quiet man pays cash in Portland for a one-way ticket to Seattle under the name Dan Cooper.
Wednesday, November 24, 1971, Portland International Airport, early afternoon
The story
It is a gray afternoon in Portland, the day before Thanksgiving. A man in a dark suit and a black raincoat walks up to the Northwest Orient counter. He pays twenty dollars in cash for a one-way seat to Seattle. He gives the name Dan Cooper.
The flight is short, about half an hour. The plane is a Boeing 727, a jet with a set of stairs that folds down from under its tail. In this story, that is the whole reason he chose it. He has thought about those stairs for a long time.
He carries a black briefcase and a small paper bag. Nobody looks twice. He takes a seat in the very last row, orders a bourbon and soda, and waits.
This story asks one question and follows it all the way down. What if the man who called himself Dan Cooper lived? Everything below is built on what the records say. Where the records stop, the story says so.
What the record says
On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper approached the counter of Northwest Orient Airlines in Portland, Oregon and used cash to buy a one-way ticket on a flight to Seattle, Washington.
FBI, Artifact of the Month caption for the Cooper plane ticket (2016)
He signed for the ticket in red ink and then sat alone awaiting the short flight.
HistoryLink.org Essay 23059
The FBI says a man calling himself Dan Cooper bought a one-way ticket with cash at the Northwest Orient counter in Portland on November 24, 1971, and the FBI still holds that ticket. Witnesses described a man in his mid-40s in a dark suit, white shirt, thin black tie and black raincoat, carrying an attache case and a paper bag. He sat in the last row of a Boeing 727-100, registration N467US, and ordered a bourbon drink. The name D. B. Cooper came from a press error, not from the ticket.