D.B. Cooper

On the afternoon of 24 November 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a middle-aged man walked up to the Northwest Orient counter at Portland International Airport, paid cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle, and gave his name as Dan Cooper. He was, by every account afterwards, entirely nondescript: dark suit, white shirt, clip-on tie, raincoat over his arm, briefcase in his hand. He looked like a thousand other men flying home for the holiday. Passengers who sat near him later struggled to describe his face at all, and their accounts did not agree. This blankness is the first strange thing about the case, and it may well have been deliberate; a man planning what he was planning would have had good reason to look like nobody in particular. The flight, Northwest Orient 305, was a Boeing 727 making the short hop north to Seattle, barely a third full. Nothing about it gave anyone the faintest reason to look twice.

Shortly after take-off he handed a folded note to a flight attendant named Florence Schaffner. She did not read it. Businessmen handed her their phone numbers often enough, and she slipped the paper into her pocket and carried on working. He leaned towards her and said, quietly, that she had better look at it, because he had a bomb. She read it then. He told her to sit beside him, and opened the briefcase far enough for her to see inside: red cylinders, wires, a battery. Whether it was real has never been established. It was convincing enough. What followed was not the panic of a desperate man but something far more unsettling — a set of demands so precise that they can only have been prepared in advance. He wanted two hundred thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills, four parachutes, and a fuel truck standing by at Seattle. Everything was written down. Everything was specific.

What every witness remembered, and what has kept the story alive for more than fifty years, was his composure. He was courteous to the crew throughout. He ordered a drink and paid for it. He did not shout, threaten anyone by name, or lose control of the situation for a moment. While the aircraft circled above Puget Sound, the airline assembled the cash and the FBI photographed the serial numbers of every note — a meticulous precaution that would matter enormously nine years later, though nobody could have known it then. Northwest Orient decided to pay. The 727 landed at Seattle-Tacoma and the money and parachutes were carried aboard. In exchange, the man released all thirty-six passengers and two of the cabin crew, who walked off into the terminal without quite understanding what they had been part of. He kept the pilots, the flight engineer and one flight attendant, and told them to start the engines. He had hijacked an airliner, collected his ransom, and let the innocent go — and the strangest part of the night had not yet begun.

His instructions for the second flight were the most revealing thing he ever did. He ordered the aircraft flown towards Mexico City, and he specified how: low, slow, with the wing flaps set at a particular angle, the landing gear down, and the cabin left unpressurised. He wanted the rear airstair — the staircase that folds down from the tail of a Boeing 727 — left unlocked. Not one of those requests was casual. Together they describe an aircraft flying barely above stalling speed at an altitude where a man could open the tail and step out — and the 727 was one of very few airliners from which that was possible. Whoever he was, he understood the machine he was sitting in, and it is this knowledge that has fed half a century of conjecture about a military or aviation background. It is a reasonable inference. It has never been proof of anything.

Shortly after seven in the evening the aircraft lifted off again into rain and darkness. The remaining flight attendant was sent forward to the cockpit and told to stay there. The crew, sealed behind the door, could only listen. At some point a warning light showed that the rear stairs were coming down. A little later they felt the aircraft tip slightly and then settle, a small pressure change in the airframe, and that was all. Somewhere over the forests of southwestern Washington, in freezing air, driving rain and total darkness, a man in a business suit and slip-on shoes stepped off the back of a moving jet with a bag of banknotes tied to his body — no helmet, no jump suit, no light, no map, and no way of knowing what lay beneath him. When the 727 landed at Reno to refuel, the crew opened the cabin and found it empty. On a seat lay his clip-on tie.

The response was immediate and enormous, and it achieved almost nothing. Soldiers, police officers and FBI agents searched thousands of square kilometres of forest, river and ravine, and aircraft flew the estimated flight path. Nothing was found: no parachute, no body, no money, no footprints. Along the way the story acquired the wrong name. A local man called D.B. Cooper was briefly questioned and quickly cleared, a reporter confused the two, and the error stuck for ever. The man on the plane had called himself Dan Cooper. One detail troubles the picture of the calm professional: of the four parachutes he was given, one was a dummy — a sewn-shut training rig, unusable — and he took it with him. A genuine expert would have opened the packs and checked. That mistake makes the confident jumper of legend rather less plausible, and is the strongest argument that he was improvising more than we like to think.

For nine years there was nothing at all. Then, in February 1980, an eight-year-old boy called Brian Ingram, clearing a spot for a fire on a sandy beach at Tena Bar on the Columbia River, turned up three bundles of twenty-dollar bills a few centimetres down. They were rotted, blackened at the edges and partly fused together, but the rubber bands still held and the serial numbers matched the list the FBI had photographed in 1971. It amounted to a few thousand dollars — a strange, unwelcome windfall for the family that found it, and the only part of the ransom ever recovered. Nobody can explain convincingly how it got there. The beach lies some distance from the estimated flight path, and the sediment has been argued over for decades: some say the notes were washed downriver years after the jump, others that dredging buried them, others that a man put them there himself. Every explanation is plausible and none is settled. As for the man, the FBI's own conclusion was that he probably did not survive the jump. Parachuting specialists have argued both ways ever since, and it can't possibly be resolved without a body or a confession.

The investigation, codenamed NORJAK, ran for forty-five years, generated an enormous file and was formally suspended in 2016, when the FBI redirected its resources elsewhere. It remains the only unsolved commercial hijacking in American history. The physical evidence is pitifully thin: the clip-on tie, on which scientists have since found microscopic particles hinting at where its owner may have worked; a few fragments near the flight path; the rotted money from Tena Bar. Hundreds of suspects have been proposed and every one has fallen apart, on an alibi, a height or an age. It is now the definition of a cold case: dormant, endlessly reopened by outsiders, formally closed by the people who once owned it. The consequences, though, were not thin at all. In the following months a wave of copycat hijackings swept American aviation, some of them lethal. Aircraft were fitted with a spring-loaded device, known ever since as the "Cooper vane", which the airflow holds shut in flight so the rear stairs cannot be lowered. Universal passenger screening followed. The unremarkable man in the dark suit is one reason you queue at an airport today.

And then there is the folk-hero problem. He threatened a full aircraft with what he claimed was a bomb, and yet he has become an American folklore figure with songs, films, festivals and merchandise, celebrated in a way no ordinary criminal ever is. It helps that nobody was hurt, that he was polite, that the victim was an airline rather than a person, and that he beat an entire system and then eluded it for ever. It helps most of all that we do not know the ending. Amateur investigators — retired engineers, scientists, obsessives with spreadsheets — still work the case with a seriousness the professionals abandoned long ago. It is worth asking why. A solved crime becomes a fact, filed and finished. An unsolved one stays open, and everyone who hears it gets to be the detective. That is the long echo of D.B. Cooper: not the money, most of which rotted in a riverbank, but the permanent invitation to guess.