On the evening of 24 November 1971, Florence Schaffner, a flight attendant on a Northwest Orient flight heading to Seattle, Washington, from Portland, Oregon, was handed a note by a male passenger seated at the back of the plane. Schaffner assumed the note was a phone number – this wasn’t the first time a passenger had hit on her – so she stowed it in her purse without reading it. The man leaned towards her and whispered: “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”
Schaffner read it: “Miss – I have a bomb in my briefcase and want you to sit by me.”
