The Man Who Jumped Out of the Sky
On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked a Seattle-bound jet, took $200,000, and parachuted into the night — never to be found.
It was the day before Thanksgiving, November 24, 1971, and a quiet man in a dark suit bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle. He gave his name as Dan Cooper. Ninety minutes later, he owned the airplane — and by midnight, he would own one of the great unsolved mysteries in American history.
Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727, at 2:50 that afternoon, one of 37 passengers. Shortly after takeoff he handed a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner: he had a bomb in his briefcase. When she asked to see it, he opened the case — she later described eight red cylinders with red-insulated wires and a cylindrical battery — and calmly gave his demands: $200,000 in cash and four parachutes, waiting in Seattle.
The airline and the FBI complied. In Seattle, the passengers were released unharmed, the money and parachutes were brought aboard, and Cooper ordered the crew to refuel and fly south toward Mexico City. About half an hour after takeoff, somewhere over the dark forests of southwestern Washington, Cooper lowered the 727's rear airstair and stepped into the night, taking the ransom money and a parachute with him. He was never seen again.
The FBI hunted him for 45 years, building one of its most famous case files, and never identified him. Because of a reporter's early error — the Bureau had questioned and cleared an unrelated man named Daniel B. Cooper — the hijacker became "D. B. Cooper" in the press, and the name stuck. In 1980, a family picnicking on the Columbia River near Vancouver, Washington, found a few thousand dollars of the ransom in decaying $20 bills, but the trail went cold again. The Bureau finally suspended the active investigation in 2016.
Cooper's jump changed aviation. After copycat hijackers tried the same trick in 1972, regulators required every Boeing 727 to be fitted with a small wedge — the "Cooper vane" — that locks the rear airstair shut in flight.
Did he survive the jump into a freezing storm over some of America's wildest country? Nobody knows. No other skyjacker in American history has ever vanished so completely. Half a century on, D. B. Cooper remains one of the great unsolved mysteries — the man who bought a $20 ticket, shown above in an FBI photograph of the actual stub, and vanished into legend.
Photo: Federal Bureau of Investigation, public domain (via Wikimedia Commons).
