Checking In...
...on the Missing Persons File
- By The Editors
- Air & Space magazine, September 2010
Search parties still hunt for Amelia Earhart, who vanished on July 2, 1937.
NASM SI-85-14508~P
(Page 2 of 2)
During the flight, Cooper told a flight attendant he had a bomb in his briefcase, which he would detonate if $200,000 in cash and four parachutes weren’t waiting at the Seattle airport. They were. After landing, Cooper allowed all passengers to be released. He told the flight crew to fly to Mexico City. Somewhere over southwestern Washington, Cooper jumped from the rear exit into below-freezing temperatures and a driving rain. He had left behind a J.C. Penney tie, a tie clip, and two parachutes.
In the following days, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had interviewed a D.B. Cooper, according to a Portland, Oregon wire service reporter, and though the man was eventually cleared, the Northwest hijacker was forever after known by that name. The question of what happened to Cooper and his bag of loot has become one of the FBI’s best-known unsolved cases.
In 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram found a bundle of tattered $20 bills totalling $5,800 buried along the banks of Washington’s Columbia River. The serial numbers identified the bills as part of the money Cooper had demanded.
In 2007, the FBI released new information, including a photograph of Cooper’s black tie, from which a DNA sample was obtained. Last year, an FBI agent unveiled a possible profile of Cooper as a loner who might have worked as a cargo loader in the U.S. Air Force (hence the familiarity with parachutes) before taking, and later losing, a job in the civil aviation industry. After 39 years, the FBI is still searching.
Diane Tedeschi
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In 1998, a bracelet bearing the name Antoine de Saint- Exupéry, along with the name of his wife, Consuelo, was fished out of the Mediterranean Sea. The French aviator and author had disappeared on July 31, 1944, while flying an F-5B, a reconnaissance version of a Lockheed P-38 Lightning. Two years after the bracelet was recovered, a diver located parts from an F-5B off Marseille. In April 2004, French authorities announced that the parts were indeed from Saint-Exupéry’s aircraft. But what had brought it down? Enemy fire? Though the fragments retrieved from the sea had no bullet holes, there were too few pieces to rule out a hit. German pilot Horst Rippert believes he likely shot down the F-5B, but his claim has not been verified. Was it suicide? Or simply an accident caused by the sometimes careless Saint-Exupéry?
Patricia Trenner
Comments (2)
While everybody wants to believe that D.B. Cooper got away I think he died on the night. I'm a former skydiver with over 450 jumps, including one from a a Boeing 727 at the World Freefall Convention.
The first odd thing is that D.B.Cooper was apparently wearing slip on shoes. No skydiver in 1971 would have jumped wearing such shoes - landings were fast at the best of times and you needed ankle protection. Any experienced jumper who was planning this would have had footwear with proper ankle protection.
But the part which makes it obvious to my mind that Cooper wasn't an experienced jumper was that he didn't bring a parachute with him. Skydivers are understandably picky about equipment and any jumper planning a hijacking would prefer to bring his own equipment rather than rely on the government to provide it to him. Not only did he create a dependency his plan didn't need, he also telegraphed his intentions. If, instead, he had disguised the parachute as a bomb and then left a suitably fractured and psychotic suicide note before jumping out the back with the money it would have taken people days - if ever - to figure out what he'd done.
The third thing I'm not so sure about - apparently he was seeing using paracord to tie the money bag to himself.
You need to be extremely careful about attaching anything to yourself and especially an object that is loose or can move. Simply failing to secure the chin strap on your helmet results in agony as it beats against your skin in the 120kt airflow. Attaching a large object and then being able to fall cleanly and not tumble - which is essential for a safe opening - would require practice.
Instead he was almost certainly an amateur who left the plane, lost his shoes, tumbled wildly while trying to open his borrowed parachute and then spent the rest of his life regretting it...
Posted by David Rolfe on September 2,2010 | 01:46 AM
I'm a skydiver too and I disagree with your assessment. Most jumpers I've talked to said the same thing as I believe..........Cooper could have easily survived this jump. Who's to say he didn't have boots in his suitcase or stuffed in his coat? We don't know what he really had with him. If he brought his own chute and didn't ask for chutes, the FBI might not have let him depart Seattle again with some of the crew. But they knew he was going to jump, per his request, so they let the plane depart Seattle. There is a lot of speculation about Cooper. The easiest scenario to construct is that he died in the jump. But where's the proof? Nothing was ever found and no one was missing a crazy uncle that night. I say he lived. One clever sob and lucky too. The legend lives on.
Posted by ed on September 10,2010 | 08:55 PM