It is 1971 and a family boards a flight to Seattle from Oregon to visit family. The
man in front of them orders a bourbon and soda. Minutes later he threatens the whole flight crew with a bomb and requests $200,000 as ransom. This is the story of D.B. Cooper.
November 24, 1971, Northwest Orient Airlines flight 305 was set to take off at 2:50 p.m.
from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington. A man who gave the name of Dan Cooper bought a ticket with cash and boards the plane in a business suit with nothing but a briefcase. While waiting for takeoff, he made himself comfortable and ordered a drink. Things quickly spiral out of control soon after.
Soon after the clock hit 3:00 p.m., Cooper hands a stewardess, Florence Schaffner, a note.
At first, she did not read the note and put it in her pocket for later. The next time she passed Cooper, he motioned towards his briefcase and told her she had better read it. She quickly headed to the back and read the note that said that Cooper had a bomb in his briefcase and requested for her to sit with him. As Schaffner did as he told her, he opened his briefcase slightly to reveal a clump of wires and demanded that she write down the words he was about to say.
This new note was for Captain William Scott and it demanded four parachutes and
$200,000 in twenty-dollar bills. He wanted them to stay in the air until the money and parachutes were ready for him. After contacting air traffic control, the Seattle police and the FBI got involved. The airline’s president, Donald Nyrop, was then contacted and he told them he believed they should comply with Cooper’s demands. The exact wording of the note is unknown because Cooper asked for it back. Cooper asked for the items to be delivered on arrival at Seattle-Tacoma Airport. He claimed that if they did not comply with his demands, he would blow up the plane. Passengers were not aware of what was happening and were simply told that the plane had some mechanical issues and that they would be circling around before landing.
Cooper specifically requested the $200,000 be in twenty-dollar bills because it would
weigh 21 pounds, which was safe enough for him to jump with. He asked that the bills have random serial numbers, not sequential ones. The FBI gave him bills with random serial numbers but made sure that all of them began with the code letter L. The parachutes were a little hard to acquire because Cooper wanted civilian parachutes with user-operated ripcords. Tacoma’s McChord Air Force Base offered to provide the parachutes but Cooper rejected them because he did not want the military-grade ones. A skydiving school ended up providing them to Cooper.
After the plane landed in Seattle, Cooper gave up the passengers for the items he
He kept several of the crew members and they took off towards Mexico. At 8 p.m., somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Cooper jumped out of the back of the plane with the money and parachutes. The pilots landed, but the weather was bad and they were not able to search the grounds until the next day. D.B. Cooper was never seen again.
The name D.B. Cooper came from a suspect in Oregon. After the suspect was cleared, the
name stuck to the case and that is what ¨Dan¨ is referred to now. The bomb was never recovered since Cooper took it with him, so it is unknown if it was real or not. The FBI called the extensive investigation ¨NORJAK¨, for Northwest Hijacking. They interviewed hundreds of people, tracked leads wherever they could, and searched the plane for evidence. More than 800 suspects were noted and most were eliminated from consideration by the five-year anniversary.
A theory that Cooper did not survive is supported by a little boy finding twenty dollar
bills rolled up in jars in the Columbia River, with serial numbers matching the ones that were given to Cooper. Many people have claimed to be Cooper, but none match the fingerprints from the plane.
Another theory that came out in 2011 was that the uncle of a woman named Marla
Cooper was D.B. Cooper. She overheard her uncle, L.D. Cooper, talking about money problems with mentions of hijacking a plane. He supposedly lost it while diving. This investigation went nowhere.
In July of 2016, the FBI officially said they would not be active in the investigation any
longer. While the theories still run rampant, the case of D.B. Cooper remains unsolved. This case is so significant because D.B. Cooper’s face was never recognized by anyone who saw the sketch and the name was never connected to a person. It is almost as if he disappeared off the face of the earth.
