D.B. Cooper

He bought his ticket with cash.

It was the afternoon before Thanksgiving, November 24, 1971, at Portland International Airport in Oregon. A quiet man in his mid-forties walked up to the Northwest Orient Airlines counter and paid about twenty dollars for a one-way ticket on Flight 305 to Seattle, a thirty-minute hop up the coast. He gave his name as Dan Cooper.

He wore a dark suit, a white shirt, a narrow black clip-on tie with a pearl tie pin, and a dark raincoat. He carried a black attaché case. He was, witnesses would say later, calm, polite, and completely forgettable.

He took seat 18C, near the back of the Boeing 727. He lit a cigarette. He ordered a bourbon and soda.

And a few minutes after three o’clock, as the plane taxied out, he became the only person in history to hijack an American airliner and vanish without a trace.

The Note

Shortly after takeoff, the man in 18C handed a folded note to Florence Schaffner, a young flight attendant sitting in a jump seat near him.

She assumed he was slipping her his phone number. Businessmen did that all the time. She tucked it into her pocket unopened.

The man leaned over and spoke to her quietly. “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”

The note, printed neatly in felt-tip pen, said that he had a bomb in his briefcase and wanted her to sit beside him. She did. He opened the attaché case just enough for her to see inside. There were what looked like eight red cylinders, a mass of wires, and a large battery.

Then he told her what he wanted. She wrote it down.

Two hundred thousand dollars in “negotiable American currency.” Four parachutes — two back packs and two chest packs. A fuel truck waiting when they landed in Seattle.

“No funny stuff,” he said, “or I’ll do the job.”

Seattle

Schaffner took the note to the cockpit. Captain William Scott radioed air traffic control. Within minutes, the FBI, the Seattle police, and the president of Northwest Orient Airlines were involved. The airline’s president made a quick decision: give the man whatever he asked for.

Flight 305 circled over Puget Sound for nearly two hours while the FBI gathered the ransom from Seattle banks — ten thousand unmarked twenty-dollar bills, every one of them photographed on microfilm so the serial numbers could be traced. The parachutes came from a local skydiving school. The thirty-six other passengers were told only that there was a minor mechanical problem. Most of them had no idea they were on a hijacked plane.

Through it all, according to the crew, the man in 18C was relaxed, even courteous. He seemed to know the area. He looked out the window and identified Tacoma below. He mentioned that McChord Air Force Base was only about twenty minutes’ drive from Seattle-Tacoma Airport. He ordered a second bourbon and paid for it — and tried to tip the flight attendant, who refused.

At 5:39 p.m., the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. It taxied to a remote corner of the tarmac. Cooper had all the window shades lowered so snipers couldn’t see in. A Northwest employee brought the money in a cloth bank bag, and the parachutes, to the rear stairs. Cooper released all the passengers, along with Schaffner and another flight attendant.

He kept the pilots, the flight engineer, and one flight attendant, Tina Mucklow.

The Jump

Cooper gave the crew very specific instructions, and they were the instructions of someone who knew what he was doing.

He wanted to fly to Mexico City. He told the pilots to fly at the lowest possible speed without stalling the aircraft — about 100 knots, or 115 miles per hour — at an altitude no higher than 10,000 feet. The landing gear was to stay down. The wing flaps were to be lowered to fifteen degrees. The cabin was to be left unpressurized.

When the crew pointed out that the plane couldn’t make Mexico City on one load of fuel at that speed and altitude, they agreed on a refueling stop in Reno, Nevada.

And then Cooper told them to leave the rear stairs down.

The Boeing 727 was unusual. It had a staircase built into the tail, under the rear of the fuselage, that could be lowered in flight. Cooper seemed to know that. The crew said that this was not safe on takeoff, and he agreed to let them take off with the stairs up.

At 7:40 p.m., Flight 305 lifted off into a dark, rainy night, heading south. Two U.S. Air Force F-106 fighter jets scrambled to follow it, along with other aircraft, though they had trouble staying behind a plane flying so slowly.

Shortly after takeoff, Cooper told Tina Mucklow to go to the cockpit and stay there. The last time she saw him, he was tying something around his waist — she thought it might have been the money bag.

At about 8:00 p.m., a warning light in the cockpit showed that the aft stairs had been lowered. The crew asked over the intercom if there was anything they could do for him.

He answered: “No.”

It was the last word anyone ever heard from him.

At about 8:13 p.m., over the forests of southwestern Washington, the tail of the plane suddenly bobbed upward and the crew felt a change in pressure. They believed that was the moment Cooper jumped.

The plane flew on to Reno, landing at about 10:15 p.m. with the rear stairs still down. FBI agents and police surrounded it. They went inside.

The cabin was empty.

What He Left Behind

Cooper took the money and two of the parachutes. He left behind the other two parachutes — one of them a dummy, a training chute sewn shut that could not have opened. He left his black clip-on tie with its pearl tie pin. He left eight cigarette butts and a few small personal items. And he left his name — or what everybody thought was his name.

In the frenzy of news coverage, a reporter got mixed up and wrote that the hijacker’s name was D.B. Cooper. The name stuck. It has followed him ever since.

The FBI called the case NORJAK — for Northwest hijacking. It would become one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in the history of the Bureau.

The Search

The night Cooper jumped, the weather was terrible: rain, wind, and temperatures well below freezing at altitude. He was wearing a business suit and loafers. He jumped into darkness over rugged, heavily forested terrain, with no helmet and no goggles, carrying a bag of cash weighing about twenty-one pounds.

Many investigators believed he couldn’t possibly have survived. The FBI’s own analysis came to suspect he was not an expert skydiver. He had chosen the dummy parachute as one of his reserves, perhaps without noticing it was sewn shut, and had picked an older, less maneuverable main chute over a better one.

Hundreds of searchers — soldiers, FBI agents, sheriff’s deputies — combed the forests near Ariel, Washington, and the Lake Merwin area in the months that followed. They found nothing. Not a body. Not a parachute. Not a single bill.

For years, the ransom serial numbers were circulated to banks, casinos and businesses around the world. None of the bills ever turned up.

The Boy on the Riverbank

Then, in February 1980, more than eight years later, an eight-year-old boy named Brian Ingram was on a family picnic on the sandy banks of the Columbia River at a spot called Tena Bar, a few miles downstream from Vancouver, Washington. He was raking the sand to build a campfire when he uncovered three bundles of decaying twenty-dollar bills, still held together with rubber bands.

There was $5,800 in all. The serial numbers matched Cooper’s ransom.

It was the only trace of the money ever found. And it raised more questions than it answered. How did the bundles get there, so far from the presumed landing area? Did they wash downstream? Were they buried? Did Cooper drop them? Experts have argued about river currents, flood dredging and sediment layers ever since.

The FBI searched the area. They found nothing else.

The Suspects

Over the decades, the FBI considered more than eight hundred suspects. Some of them were obvious frauds — people who confessed for attention, family members who were convinced a late uncle was the man. A few have been taken seriously.

Richard McCoy Jr., a former Army paratrooper and Sunday school teacher, hijacked a United Airlines 727 in April 1972, five months after Cooper, using nearly identical methods. He jumped from the rear stairs over Utah with $500,000. He was caught within days. Some agents thought he was Cooper; others noted that he didn’t match the witness descriptions and may have been elsewhere on Thanksgiving. He was killed in a shootout with the FBI in 1974 after escaping from prison.

Kenneth Christiansen, a former Army paratrooper who worked for Northwest Orient as a purser, became a popular suspect after his death in 1994, when his brother found suspicious items among his belongings. Robert Rackstraw, a Vietnam veteran with military parachute training and a long criminal record, was the subject of a team of independent investigators who were certain of his guilt. The FBI looked at both and found insufficient evidence.

In the 2000s, the FBI extracted a partial DNA profile from Cooper’s clip-on tie. It hasn’t matched anyone. Later, scientists studying particles on the tie found traces of rare metals, including titanium, which some have suggested could point to an aerospace or chemical worker.

In July 2016, the FBI announced that it was ending its active investigation into the Cooper case to focus its resources on other priorities. The case was not closed. The Bureau said it would still accept and review physical evidence related to the parachutes or the money.

Folk Hero

Over the years, D.B. Cooper turned into something strange: an American folk hero. There are songs about him, books, films, and a festival each November in the small town of Ariel, Washington, where people gather at a tavern to toast the man who jumped into the dark and was never found.

It’s easy to understand why. He didn’t hurt anyone. He was polite. He beat the system. He vanished.

But I think it’s worth remembering what it was like for the people on that plane. Florence Schaffner, sitting next to a man she believed had a bomb. Tina Mucklow, alone in the cabin with him for hours. The crew, flying a crippled airliner through a storm at night, not knowing if he would blow them all out of the sky.

And whoever he was, somewhere — on a riverbank, in the forest, or in a quiet life under another name — he took the answer with him.