We still don’t know where most of D.B. Cooper’s money landed in 1971, but one Vancouver woman had an interesting view of the other end of that transaction.
Susan Greb watched as $200,000 was loaded onto the hijacked Boeing 727 at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Back then, Greb said, “I worked for Pan American. I ran the Clipper Club, the VIP lounge on Concourse B at Sea-Tac airport. We had heard about the hijacking.
“It was a Northwest 727 on the way from Portland to Seattle. I remember somebody saying it was interesting that someone would hijack a plane from Portland to Seattle. It’s a relatively inexpensive ticket.”
Greb and a ticket supervisor for Western Airlines spent about 90 minutes watching from her Clipper Club post as, well, not a lot was going on.
“It took quite a while for armored cars to get the money. They fueled the airplane, too; it was kind of a slow procedure,” Greb recalled. “We were standing there, watching the plane for long periods of time, and nothing happened.
“Even at the time, the speculation was that he was a laid-off Boeing engineer,” she said, referring to the man who became known as D.B. Cooper. “The guy knew a lot about the airplane. When he asked for parachutes, people were saying he knew about letting the rear stairs down and parachuting off.”
After that night, Greb said, she and the guy from Western Airlines always had some advice to share.
“Pay attention. You might think it’s not an interesting shift and it might get interesting.”
Off Beat lets members of The Columbian news team step back from our newspaper beats to write the story behind the story, fill in the story or just tell a story.
