D.B. Cooper: The Vanishing Hijacker
On 24 November 1971 a man called Dan Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305, took $200,000 and jumped over Washington. Only $5,800 has ever been found.
On 24 November 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a man who bought his ticket as “Dan Cooper” hijacked Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. He claimed to have a bomb, collected $200,000 and four parachutes at Seattle-Tacoma Airport, and then jumped from the rear stairs of the Boeing 727 somewhere over southwest Washington. He has never been identified. In February 1980 a boy found about $5,800 of the ransom on the bank of the Columbia River. The FBI stopped actively investigating in July 2016. It is often called the only unsolved hijacking in American commercial aviation.
The name
The hijacker bought his ticket as Dan Cooper. The name D. B. Cooper came from a press mix-up. A reporter for the Oregon Journal, James Long, wrote it down as “D. B. Cooper” after police questioned a Portland man of that name, and the UPI reporter Clyde Jabin repeated it. The real D. B. Cooper was quickly cleared. The wrong initials stuck.
A quiet man on a short flight
Flight 305 left Portland on time at 2.50 p.m. The hijacker sat in seat 18E. He was described as a calm man in his mid-forties, in a dark suit, white shirt and narrow black tie, carrying a black briefcase. He ordered a bourbon and soda.
Soon after take-off he handed a note to the flight attendant Florence Schaffner. She assumed it was a phone number and put it in her pocket. He leaned over and told her, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.” He opened the briefcase enough for her to see red cylinders wired to a battery. He asked for $200,000 in “negotiable American currency”, four parachutes and a fuel truck in Seattle.
The crew were Captain William Scott, First Officer Bill Rataczak, flight engineer Harold Anderson, and flight attendants Schaffner, Alice Hancock and Tina Mucklow. Northwest’s president, Donald Nyrop, told them to cooperate. The plane circled Puget Sound for about two hours while the money and parachutes were found.
The exchange at Seattle
The ransom came from Seattle First National Bank. It was 10,000 twenty-dollar bills, and the FBI photographed them so the serial numbers were on record. The parachutes came from a local skydiving centre and were packed by the rigger Earl Cossey. Asking for four made it look as if he might take a hostage with him, which would stop anyone handing him a sabotaged chute.
Flight 305 landed at Seattle-Tacoma at 5.46 p.m. A single airline employee brought out the money and parachutes. The hijacker let the passengers go, along with Schaffner and Hancock. He kept the three men on the flight deck and Tina Mucklow.
The jump
He told the crew to fly towards Mexico City, with a refuelling stop in Reno. He wanted the plane at the slowest safe speed, below 10,000 feet, with the landing gear down, flaps lowered and the cabin unpressurised. He also wanted the rear airstair left open. That stairway in the tail was a feature of the 727, and his demands showed he knew the aircraft well.
The plane left Seattle at about 7.40 p.m. Two F-106 fighters from McChord Air Force Base and a T-33 trainer followed it, but saw nothing in the dark and cloud. The hijacker sent Mucklow to the cockpit. At about 8.13 p.m. the crew felt the tail pitch up, a sign that the airstair had been lowered and someone had stepped off. When the plane landed in Reno, the cabin was empty.
He had jumped at night into rain, in a business suit and loafers, into a wind of about 15°F (minus 9°C). Agents found one main parachute and one reserve he had cut open, with shroud lines removed. The other main and a dummy training reserve, which was sewn shut and would not open, were gone. Cossey later thought he used the dummy’s container to carry the money. He also left behind his black clip-on tie with a mother-of-pearl tie clip.
The search
No one knew exactly when he jumped, so the drop zone was a wide band of forest and hills in southwest Washington, near Ariel and Lake Merwin. Searches on the ground and from the air in the weeks and months after found nothing. The FBI called the case NORJAK. By the fifth anniversary it had considered more than 800 suspects and ruled out all but two dozen. Between 1971 and 2016 it processed more than 1,000 “serious suspects”.
The tie became the main physical clue. By late 2007 the FBI had a partial DNA profile from it, though it could not show the DNA was Cooper’s. A private group, the Cooper Research Team, later reported particles of pure titanium on it. That hints at someone who worked in aerospace or chemical manufacturing, but it is not proof.
The money on the river
On 10 February 1980 Brian Ingram, aged eight, was raking sand for a campfire at Tena Bar, on the Columbia River below Vancouver, Washington. He dug up three rotting bundles of twenty-dollar bills, about $5,800 in all. The serial numbers matched the ransom. The find raised more questions than it answered. Tena Bar is well outside the likely drop zone. Some think the money washed down a river. Others think it was buried. No other ransom bill has ever turned up in circulation.
The suspects
Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. was an Army veteran and skydiver who hijacked United Airlines Flight 855 on 7 April 1972 and parachuted over Utah. He was caught two days later, escaped from prison, and was killed in a shoot-out with FBI agents in Virginia Beach in 1974. The FBI ruled him out as Cooper. He was 29, much younger than the man described on Flight 305.
Robert Rackstraw, a former Army paratrooper, was pushed as the answer by a private team of investigators. He denied it and died in 2019. Kenneth Christiansen, a Northwest Orient purser with paratrooper training, was put forward by his brother Lyle after Kenneth died in 1994. He was 5 ft 8 in, shorter than the witnesses described. Sheridan Peterson, a Second World War Marine, former smokejumper and Boeing technical editor in Seattle, was 44 at the time. He said he was in Nepal. He died in 2021. None of these has been confirmed.
Did he survive?
The FBI has long leaned towards the view that he died. Its own history of the case notes that his parachute could not be steered, his clothes and shoes were unsuitable, and he jumped into woods at night. It adds that the evidence suggests he was not a seasoned skydiver. None of the money he took was ever spent in a way that was detected. The case for survival rests on his evident planning, the uncertainty about where he jumped, and the fact that no body or parachute has ever been found.
On 8 July 2016 the FBI announced it was ending its active investigation. It said it would still look at physical evidence that might link to the parachutes or the money.
A folk hero
Cooper became a folk figure. He hurt no one and was polite throughout, which helped. From 1974 to 2015 the Ariel General Store and Tavern held a “Cooper Day” every November. But he did put a planeload of people in fear of a bomb, and the crew who flew on with him had no way of knowing it was fake. Tina Mucklow, who spent the most time with him, kept flying for several years and has rarely spoken about it.