Posted on 07/30/2011 7:31:04 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
After hijacking an aeroplane and extorting $200,000 from the FBI, DB Cooper coolly made his escape via parachute. Forty years on, is America’s most elusive fugitive finally in sight?
The night before Thanksgiving, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper, wearing a suit and raincoat, walked up to the Northwest Orient desk at Portland airport in the United State’s Pacific Northwest and spent $20 on a one-way ticket to Seattle.
On the plane, he donned a pair of dark sunglasses, ordered a whiskey, lit up a cigarette and coolly handed the stewardess a note. In capital letters, it read: I HAVE A BOMB IN MY BRIEFCASE. I WILL USE IT IF NECESSARY. I WANT YOU TO SIT NEXT TO ME. YOU ARE BEING HIJACKED.
What happened next would ensure Cooper a place in the pantheon of American folk heroes.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
I can understand that. According to the numbers we were a hell of a lot better off in many ways 40 years ago.
Median income 1971 - $9,000
Median income 2011 - $45,000 to $50,000
(hard to find an exact number that hasn't been "adjusted" by the government)
So individual median income has increased by a factor of 5 while most consumer goods have increased by a factor of 10 or more.
And a huge part of that is because of big increases in the tax burden on individual items, on manufacturers and on businesses.
The FBI provided the shutes, and he used them?
Talk about faith....
Aw shucks, I was enjoying the fantasy. Oh well. On a heavier note, Cooper probably injured himself in his jump and was eaten by wild things. Some of the money in $20’s was found in the woods where he would have landed, by some kids IIRC. His parachute was also found, I think.
“Validate your inner curmudgeon.”
It’s getting to be my daily habit.
They pumped your gas, checked your oil and everything else under the hood, checked the tire pressures and you never got out of your car.
During the 76-77 drought when lake levels were really low, a family on an outing found a bunch of the money buried in the silt. The low lake level made it easy to find. The family was filmed for the news report, and ironically, the father had outstanding warrants in another state.
Not that I’d want to with tsa serving it up....
Stay safe....
$20 for a one way ticket.
You can’t check a damn bag for $20. Ticket taxes are more than $20 now.
Yeah, well, they were always suckers for the redistributionist types.
Sure you did!--use the (clean!) restroom, splurge and spend a quarter on a coke and a bag of chips...
I flew a 727 charter from Lajes Field, Azores to Philadelphia back in the mid 80’s.
As part of the preflight briefing we were informed we were flying on the 727 that Cooper hijacked.
Trivia cool.
He asked for two chutes because he as going to make a stewardess jump with him, as insurance that they didn't give him a faulty chute.
Amen. I enjoyed the movie ‘Godfather” til I thought about all the damage these people have done to the country. And the arrogance they displayed for the legal system.
Now it is impossible to watch shows like the “Sopranos” without wishing they would disappear.
My first flight was a DC-3. My dad took me from Daytona Beach to Jacksonville. The aisle was so slanted that I had a hard time walking to my seat. We flew low the entire way and went over an airfield that had thousands of fighter planes in mothballs...maybe it was Green Cove Springs. My mother, brother, and sister picked us up at the JAX field and we drove to visit Silver Springs before going back home. It must have been about 1947 and we had our first new tires on the car since the war.
In 1971 you would have expected to live large for at least ten years on that. In the fifties you could have deposited that much and lived well on the interest.
And they scrubbed and washed your windshield.
When I look at ratios of income there is no doubt higher taxes come into play. Home values went from 2.5 times income to 5 times. Total taxes paid today, no matter who you are, is about 55%, as the federal, State and local government spend 55% of GDP.
I liked flying into Oakland. SanFran was usually fogged in so we had to land in Oakland anyway.
Higher taxes, new taxes, new and higher fees, more and more government regulations that drive up the cost of construction, manufacturing, tranporting goods, operating a business.
Yet the "experts" are at a loss when it comes to explaining why more jobs aren't being created.
I work for a Fortune 100 company, and even they are stepping back from hiring, capital improvements, R&D, etc. We are no doubt cash rich but the company bean counters are not expecting it to stay that way. Just to keep our hides intact we had to rename our department from Advanced Research to Product Development.
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