D.B. Cooper’s Still-Unsolved Skyjacking Heist
Federal Bureau of InvestigationThe only known images of D.B. Cooper are these composite sketches that were created from witness testimony.
Few heists have the same air of eerie mystery as that of D.B. Cooper’s heist, which remains the only unsolved skyjacking in history. Following a meticulously-planned hostage situation, Cooper dropped out of the air and off the record, never to be seen again.
The infamous heist began the day before Thanksgiving on Nov. 24, 1971. Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 filled up about a third of its seats with passengers bound for Seattle. Among them was “Dan Cooper,” a quiet, middle-aged man in a black business suit.
Shortly after takeoff, Cooper informed the flight attendant that he had a bomb and several demands: $200,000, four parachutes, and for the Boeing 727-100 to be refueled immediately upon landing. He promised that he wouldn’t harm any of the passengers, but that four crew members would have to stay behind.
Cooper stuck to his word, releasing the passengers as soon as he was given the money and the parachutes. Once the plane was refueled, he instructed the pilots to take off, keep the plane low, stay slow, and unpressurized. They plane was nevertheless followed by several other aircrafts from the Air Force and Air National Guard.
As they flew from Seattle to Reno, Nevada, Cooper made use of his parachutes and jumped.
Wikimedia CommonsIn 1980, an eight-year-old boy found some of Cooper’s ransom money on a camping trip. To date, this is one of only two pieces of solid evidence found in the aftermath of the skyjacking.
The FBI never positively identified the hijacker. Among the suspects they arrested was one D.B. Cooper, an Oregon resident who was eventually released, but a reporter confused the alias “Dan Cooper” with the innocent Oregonian and the name stuck.
What they could say for certain was that Cooper, or whatever the hijacker’s name really was, was knowledgeable about aircraft, knew intimately the capabilities of the 727, and was able to correctly identify locations in eastern Washington by sight from the air.
This, combined with his knowledge of the McChord Air Force Base and the intricacies of military parachutes, suggested that he had a military background. But after decades of fruitless investigation, investigators still have never gotten close to identifying the mysterious air pirate, and the FBI suspended the investigation officially in 2019.
