The adacious hijacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 on November 24, 1971, degenerated into a frustrating quest for the FBI while remaining a fascinating “who done it” for the rest of us. Still unsolved after five decades, this aviation mystery evolved from a short list of solid facts into an urban legend bearing a thick overlay of conjecture. A new and novel form of grand larceny in the tradition of Bonnie and Clyde seemed to have been created. Maybe a “little guy” had actually beaten the system?

A nondescript olive-skinned man carrying a black briefcase and traveling alone under the ticketed name of Dan Cooper boarded the 727 at 3 p.m. for the short hop from Portland to Seattle. The passenger load of 36 Thanksgiving travelers was unusually light for a pre-holiday afternoon. With the declaration of open seating, Cooper settled himself into seat 18E in the very last row and then purchased with cash a bourbon and soda while chain-smoking Raleigh filtered cigarettes. Not long after takeoff he handed a note to the nearest flight attendant that said, in neatly drawn capital letters: “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.” When the attendant put the note, unread, into her pocket, Cooper said, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”

After the 727 landed in Seattle, Cooper’s demands for refueling, $200,000 in cash and four parachutes were met. His clean-cut appearance, rational demeanor and technical knowledge were all indicators of a bright, normal person. The 35 other passengers, plus two of the three flight attendants, were released in Seattle and interviewed by the FBI. Some estimated the hijacker’s age at about 45. Bill Mitchell, a college student seated in 15A, reported seeing thermal long underwear extending into the gap between Cooper’s pant cuffs and the loafers he wore.

The remaining crew of four was instructed to fly through the inky darkness destined for Mexico City at 10,000 feet, unpressurized, with flaps and landing gear extended. This high-drag configuration rapidly consumed a full load of jet fuel, requiring a refueling stop in Reno, Nev., shortly after 11. There it was confirmed that Cooper, the ransom, the bomb and a parachute were gone.

A worldwide phenomena at the time, hijackings typically ran their course and were forgotten. The first airliner hijacked to Cuba was in 1961. The pace quickened to three per month during the summer of 1969. Perpetrators ranged from the mentally unbalanced to political dissidents avenging a genuine (or contrived) grievance. U.S. airlines generally obliged the demands of the hijacker because passengers, aircrews and airframes most often survived. That precedent abruptly ended with the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001—an epic event that triggered creation of the Transportation Security Administration, intense airport passenger screening, fortified cockpit doors and vigilant passenger identification.


*Seat Cooper sat on

As authorities initially investigated a suspect named D.B. Cooper who was quickly cleared of involvement, that name erroneously slipped into one of the first press accounts and became immortalized. Attracted to the Reno airport by broadcast news accounts, gawkers lined the chain link fence, staring at the wayward airliner parked with its aft ventral stairway extended. FBI agents went to work, dusting for fingerprints and searching for other forensic evidence. Without DNA testing (not yet invented), an ashtray full of cigarette butts was lost. (DNA tests were later conducted on a sample from a tie that Cooper had left on the 727, but proved inconclusive.) Cooper was aboard the airliner for five hours, chatting freely with cabin attendants, yet shared no useful clues about his identity. Handwriting analysts were stymied because Cooper reclaimed his handwritten notes before bailout.



Already the D.B. Cooper mystique was evolving into a cultural phenomenon. Few criminals become heroic, but Cooper had touched a nerve. The story was rife with gaps and inconsistencies, inviting speculation. The result is enough books to fill a grocery store shopping cart.

Brief glances into the briefcase convinced the crew that the bomb was real. The demand for a flight attendant to sit next to Cooper bestowed three important benefits during the layover in Seattle: The interphone provided instant communication directly with the captain; close proximity discouraged intervention by a law enforcement sharpshooter; and, most important, her safety was the stated reason the cockpit crew remained with the airplane.

Cooper demonstrated an understanding of airport operations. Furthermore, he had an insider’s knowledge of aviation. When asked the desired flap setting, he instantly responded “15 degrees.”

The Port of Seattle, FBI and the airline acceded to Cooper’s every whim—a strategy endorsed by Northwest Orient’s president, Donald Nyrop. Despite some delays, nothing requested was denied; however, rounding up cash and parachutes late in the afternoon on Thanksgiving eve was a challenge. Fortunately a hoard of circulated $20 bills existed in a safe at Seattle First National Bank (Seafirst) as a kidnapping contingency ransom fund. Best of all, the serial numbers were already recorded. Each bundle, holding $2,000, was secured by a rubber band. The cache of $200,000 weighed 21 pounds. Attempts to obtain parachutes from nearby McChord Air Force Base failed. Earl Cossey, a local FAA-certified parachute packer, provided two backpack-style military parachutes via Linn Emrich’s sport jumping business, which also supplied two chest-style chutes.

Exceptionally polite, Cooper became agitated and invoked profanity only once. That was when the refueling in Seattle went awry, possibly at the behest of the FBI, though it was blamed on vapor lock. A step truck was positioned at the left front cabin door. With the arrival of cash and parachutes, Cooper ordered the other hostages to deplane. The sole remaining flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, a deeply religious 22-year-old, scurried up and down the step truck stairway five times, each time delivering a parcel to Cooper

Rich food for conspiracy nuts - like JFK assasination

Cooper first inventoried the loot before focusing on the parachutes. A military emergency parachute consists of a canopy made of ripstop nylon, 28 feet in diameter, secured to the harness by risers. With surgical precision, Cooper quickly went to work on one of the chest-style sport parachutes by opening it and using his pocketknife to harvest six-foot riser segments.

Confronted with a choice of a superior performing sport chute, Cooper instead opted for a military backpack-style parachute and began his own inspection by pulling the record booklet from its pocket. Satisfied, he deftly donned the chute. Mucklow was impressed with how quickly he adjusted the chest and leg straps. The purloined riser cords were used to wrap a packet of cash and then secure it to his waist so that the improvised rucksack would impact the ground first—another hallmark of military training.

After daylight gave way to darkness, a radio call went out: “Tower, Northwest 305 is ready for taxi.” As is typical for late November, a fierce storm off the nearby Pacific Ocean pummeled western Washington that night.

Huddled in the cockpit, Captain William Scott was in constant radio contact with both air traffic controllers and company headquarters in Minneapolis. Cooper was not privy to this dialog, but it probably distracted copilot William Rataczak. It was his turn to fly this segment. Victor 23 is the imaginary pathway in the sky plied by airliners between the busy Seattle (SEA) and Portland (PDX) airports. Rather than the normal steep climb into the serene atmosphere above, Rataczak disengaged the autopilot and hand-flew the big Boeing tri-jet southward through the low-hanging storm clouds, intermittent precipitation and constant crosswinds gusting to 45 mph.

Shortly after takeoff, Cooper ordered Mucklow to extinguish the cabin lights, close the first-class curtain, go to the cockpit and stay there. The two exchanged a final friendly wave as she pulled the first-class curtain shut. Cooper was never seen again. Indicator lights in the cockpit signaled when the aft door and ventral stairway were unlatched. At 8:12 p.m., the crew sensed a subtle airframe shudder accompanied by a change in cabin pressure, suggesting Cooper had jumped.


*Cooper
*FBI agents on the Cooper's case

Nonsense.
Michael Scofield busted him out of jail in 2006. I was there.

A man named Dick Briggs came forward and claimed to be the infamous D. B. Cooper. His claim to be an expert in parachuting and having served the Army as a Special Forces soldier during the Vietnam War immediately made him a notable suspect as D.B. Cooper.

For a short while, author and self-made sleuth Thomas J. Colbert did believe that Briggs was D.B.Cooper as he fit the criteria and ticked most of the boxes that pointed towards him being D.B. Cooper. In 1980, however, Briggs died from a car accident, and shortly after, Colbert and the FBI officials and investigators confirmed that Briggs was not the man they were looking for.

“I spent eight months on that thread. I actually believed he was Cooper. But then I find out he's [Briggs] never been to Vietnam, can't parachute…He was a part-time weekend warrior for the Air Force, so he didn't have to go to Vietnam. Right at that point, I'm looking at this man and thinking, 'I got the wrong guy.” - Thomas J. Colbert

HeartlessMan:
Nonsense.
Michael Scofield busted him out of jail in 2007. I was there.

,and how's your day going so far ?

Best suspect


Robert Rackstraw served as a helicopter pilot for the US Army and earned multiple awards for completing chopper rescues during the Vietnam War. However, Rackstraw violated the rules and his commanders’ instruction by making unauthorized parachute jumps and lying about attending two universities. As a result, his seven-year career with the US Army came to an end.

After being laid off from the US Army, Rackstraw began showing reckless behavior and became a four-time felon, escape artist, and state prison convict. Later, the FBI considered Rackstraw a promising suspect after seeing his striking resemblance to the D.B. Cooper sketch and comparing his military skill sets and a criminal record which would determine the likeliness that he could be the guy they had been looking for. But after finding no evidence and any direct link between Robert Rackstraw and the D.B. Cooper case, the FBI eliminated Rackstraw as a suspect


Detailed in his book, Thomas J. Colbert and his team admitted to having found 93 pieces of circumstantial evidence that point to Robert Rackstraw as the man behind the D.B. Cooper persona. After being discharged from the Army in 1971, Rackstraw started to fly small planes for a real estate development company in the Washington and Pacific Northwest (believed to be where D.B. Cooper landed from the jump).

Other Suspects



Robert Rackstraw and Dick Briggs weren’t the only ones suspected of being the mysterious D.B. Cooper. The FBI had considered more than 800 suspects throughout the D.B. Cooper investigation. For a brief period of time, Richard McCoy became a favorite suspect of the FBI because he committed a copycat hijacking just five months after the D.B. Cooper incident, where he leaped from the aft stairs of another Boeing 727 flight with a $500,000 ransom. However, McCoy escaped prison and was later killed in a shootout with law enforcement. Army veteran Duane Weber became a nother suspect when he told his wife, “I’m Dan Cooper,” on his deathbed, and she later learned of his criminal past.

My mentor, i want to grow up to be like him.

You want to become a criminal when you grow up?

longetivity:
My mentor, i want to grow up to be like him.

D B Cooper

Very calculative criminal. Very noiseless, knowledge equipped thief.

Unlike one drug lord from Chicago that's full of noise and lies.

Though both are thieves

Cool guy

What I don't get on this forum is how op's thread hardly makes FP even when it's filled up with so much information and at the same time educating but someone will just open a thread of " how I enjoyed myself at the market or mall" and boom FP straight without any meaningful information, education or even exciting sef...

Tokskob2008:
What I don't get on this forum is how op's thread hardly makes FP even when it's filled up with so much information and at the same time educating but someone will just open a thread of " how I enjoyed myself at the market or mall" and boom FP straight without any meaningful information, education or even exciting sef...

HeartlessMan:
Nonsense.
Michael Scofield busted him out of jail in 2006. I was there.

Them still catch am when him wound for belle before then go climb that wire to the fence

Tokskob2008:
What I don't get on this forum is how op's thread hardly makes FP even when it's filled up with so much information and at the same time educating but someone will just open a thread of " how I enjoyed myself at the market or mall" and boom FP straight without any meaningful information, education or even exciting sef...

For it to reach FP, it must be like the following.

- Tinubu urinates again.

- Hausa man rapes 3days old baby.

- Chuckwudi Ewerum caught with mkurummiri in Dubai.

- The snake I killed in my farm.

- I am in love with my friends father - by Siofra.

- Men are scum.

---

If the titles and info does not fall into similar categories as any of the above, just fogerabourit.

Tokskob2008:
What I don't get on this forum is how op's thread hardly makes FP even when it's filled up with so much information and at the same time educating but someone will just open a thread of " how I enjoyed myself at the market or mall" and boom FP straight without any meaningful information, education or even exciting sef...

Kudos @OP, more ink to your writing pen........you're doing well

Though this is interesting but i thought the op would've added some of his own theories to make it fresh and original and this copy copy.

He didn't travel with any means of identifications like ID card or passport?

Charles Westmoreland

Alexander Mahone

Scofield has explain to us who really D.B. Cooper is

Irupetepete:
He didn't travel with any means of identifications like ID card or passport?

Yes a false name D.B Cooper