D.B. Cooper Hijacking

On the evening of November 24, 1971, a nondescript man calling himself Dan Cooper drawn closer the counter of Northwest Situate Aircrafts in Portland, Oregon.

He utilized cash to purchase a one-way ticket on Flight #305, bound for Seattle, Washington.

Thus started one of the awesome unsolved riddles in FBI history.


Cooper was a calm man who showed up to be in his mid-40s, wearing a trade suit with a dark tie and white shirt.

He requested a drink—bourbon and soda—while the flight was holding up to take off.

A brief time after 3:00 p.m., he given the attendant a note showing that he had a bomb in his briefcase and needed her to sit with him.


The staggered attendant did as she was told. Opening a cheap attaché case, Cooper appeared her a see of a mass of wires and ruddy colored sticks and requested that she type in down what he told her.

Soon, she was strolling a modern note to the captain of the plane that requested four parachutes and $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills.

When the flight landed in Seattle, the ruffian traded the flight’s 36 travelers for the cash and parachutes. Cooper kept a few team individuals, and the plane took off once more, requested to set a course for Mexico City.

Somewhere between Seattle and Reno, a small after 8:00 p.m., the ruffian did the mind blowing: He hopped out of the back of the plane with a parachute and the deliver cash. The pilots landed securely, but Cooper had vanished into the night and his extreme destiny remains a riddle to this day.

The FBI learned of the wrongdoing in-flight and quickly opened an broad examination that endured numerous a long time. Calling it NORJAK, for Northwest Seizing, we met hundreds of individuals, followed leads over the country, and scoured the flying machine for prove. By the five-year commemoration of the seizing, we’d considered more than 800 suspects and disposed of all but two dozen from consideration.

One individual from our list, Richard Floyd McCoy, is still a favorite suspect among numerous. We followed down and captured McCoy for a comparative plane capturing and elude by parachute less than five months after Cooper’s flight. But McCoy was afterward ruled out since he didn’t coordinate the about indistinguishable physical depictions of Cooper given by two flight specialists and for other reasons.

Perhaps Cooper didn’t survive his bounce from the plane. After all, the parachute he utilized couldn’t be controlled, his clothing and footwear were unacceptable for a harsh landing, and he had hopped into a lush region at night—a perilous suggestion for a prepared professional, which prove recommends Cooper was not. This hypothesis was given an included boost in 1980 when a youthful boy found a spoiling bundle full of twenty-dollar bills ($5,800 in all) that coordinated the deliver cash serial numbers.

Where did “D.B.” come from? It was clearly a myth made by the press. We did address a man with the initials “D.B.” but he wasn’t the hijacker.

The brave capture and vanishing stay an captivating mystery—for law authorization and novice sleuths alike.