The Disappearance of D. B.

Cooper
D. B. Cooper is an epithet for an unidentified person
who hijacked Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 during
November 24th, 1971.

N467US, the aircraft which was hijacked during the incident.

The hijacker extorted $200,000, asked to be taken to Mexico

City before parachuting over southwestern Washington during
the second flight. The hijacker purchased his plane ticket using
the alias “Dan Cooper” but became known as D. B. Cooper due
to a news miscommunication.

A drawing of D. B. Cooper made by the FBI during 1972.

The FBI investigated this incident for around 45 years after the
hijacking, but suspended the investigation in July 2016.
 Over 45 years, the FBI made public some of its
working hypotheses and tentative conclusions, which was
drawn from witness testimony and the scarce amount of
physical evidence available. The flight attendants whom spent
the most time with Cooper gave identical descriptions, which
were that he was 1.78 metres tall, around 82 kg, in his mid-40s
with brown eyes and swarthy skin. It was theorized that the
hijacker took his alias from a popular Belgian comic series
featuring the fictional Royal Canadian Air Force test pilot, Dan
Cooper.
The FBI speculated from the beginning that Cooper
never survived his jump due to the terrible weather conditions
and without proper equipment. The conditions mentioned
being that he jumped into the pitch-black night, in the rain,
with -9 °C wind going 77 meters a second at 3,000 meters in the
air, without a helmet nor a functioning parachute. Even if he
somehow were to survive his fall, survival in the mountainous
terrain during winter would have been impossible without an
accomplice at a landing point. This would have required a
precisely timed which would need cooperation from the flight
crew. It was speculated Cooper never had any clear idea where
he was during his jump into the stormy night.
A year after the hijacking, 31 more hijackers
committed similar incidents in American airspace. Nineteen of
them were done for the purpose of extorting money and 15 of
the hijackers asked for parachutes. This caused the Federal
Aviation Administration to begin requiring airlines to search all
passengers and the items they were taking in early 1973. Only
two hijackings were attempted during this year. The FAA also
required that the exterior of all Boeing 727 aircraft be modified
with a spring-loaded device that prevents the lowering of the
aft airstair during flight. This was called the “Cooper vane”.

The Cooper Vane.

The planes were also modified with a peephole in the cockpit

door; this allowed the cockpit crew to observe passengers
without opening the cockpit door.
View through a peephole.