D.B. Cooper

He parachuted out of a plane into a dark and stormy night with US$200,000 in cash strapped to his body. Despite an exhaustive search, D.B. Cooper was never found.

Hey – thanks for the great response to the last couple of posts. Loving all of the positive feedback. I will try hard to make sure that every post is sufficiently interesting!

Also, last week’s video podcast has been posted. See below.

Remo

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Composite sketches created by the FBI of the unknown hijacker of Northwest Orient Flight 305. Credit: FBI sketch artist Roy Rose

On 24 November 1971, a man using the name “Dan Cooper” purchased a one-way ticket for US$20 on Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305. The flight, a short hop from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington, seemed routine. Cooper, described as a middle-aged man in a suit, black tie and trench coat, boarded the Boeing 727, ordered a bourbon and soda [Ed: Being offered a drink on a 30-minute flight, those were the days!], put on some mirror sunnies and sat quietly. Shortly after takeoff, he handed a note to a flight attendant, Florence Schaffner. Assuming it was just another passenger hitting on her, she tucked the note away until Cooper leaned in and whispered, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.” He then opened his briefcase, revealing wires, red sticks and a battery.

Cooper’s demands were both precise and audacious: US$200,000 in cash (equivalent to over US$1.54 million in 2025), four parachutes and a truck standing by to refuel the plane in Seattle. The airline’s president authorised the ransom payment to prioritise passenger safety, while the plane circled Puget Sound, giving authorities time to gather the money and equipment. When the flight landed, Cooper exchanged the passengers for the ransom and parachutes, keeping several crew members on board. He instructed the pilots to fly toward Mexico City at a low altitude of 3,000 metres (10,000 feet) and at a slow speed with the landing gear deployed. Somewhere over the Pacific Northwest, during a cold and rainy night, Cooper lowered the plane’s rear staircase and parachuted out into the dark with the cash strapped to his body. All he left behind was a black tie with an attached mother-of-pearl tie clip.

Despite an exhaustive search, Cooper was never found. Authorities scoured the dense wilderness, checked riverbanks, and monitored small airstrips, but no trace of the man or the money surfaced. In 1980, a young boy digging along the Columbia River discovered a small bundle of deteriorated US$20 bills that matched the ransom serial numbers. How the money ended up there remains one of the many unanswered questions in this case.

Over the decades, countless theories have been proposed about Cooper’s identity and fate. Some believe he didn’t survive the jump – facing brutal weather, dense terrain and the difficulty of using an unsteerable parachute. Others argue he was a skilled paratrooper or survivalist, pointing to the precision of his demands. While the FBI investigated numerous suspects, none fit all the evidence, and the man’s true identity remains unknown.

In 2016, the FBI closed its investigation, admitting that after decades of chasing leads, the case was “exhausted”. Still, the mystery of D.B. Cooper has lived on in popular culture, sparking countless books, films and amateur investigations. To this day, he is viewed by many as a symbol of rebellion and ingenuity, thumbing his nose at the system, vanishing into history. Every year, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, there’s a party at the General Store in Ariel, WA, in honour of D.B. Cooper, the skyjacker that got away. [Ed: There’s the US in a nutshell.]

Postscript
To prevent future hijackings of this nature, the FAA mandated the development of a mechanical device called the “Cooper vane”, installed outside the rear staircase of an aircraft that is pushed into a locked position by air pressure when the plane is flying, preventing the staircase from being lowered.

Story Idea: Nils Benson

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REMORANDOM Book Chapter

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