...
Crime & heists
24 November 1971 · Over south-western Washington State (USA)
Hijacking & kidnappingStatus: Unsolved
Image: Roy Rose · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
$ 200.000ransom with which the hijacker jumped from the aircraft
Around 1970 dozens of aircraft a year were hijacked in the United States; passengers and luggage were not yet screened. On 24 November 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a man in a dark suit bought a one-way ticket from Portland to Seattle under the name Dan Cooper. The name 'D. B. Cooper' arose later through a journalist's mistake.
Shortly after take-off the man handed a flight attendant a note and let her look into his briefcase, which held something resembling a bomb. He demanded $200,000 and four parachutes. In Seattle he released the 36 passengers in exchange for the money. He then had the aircraft fly low and slow towards Mexico, and somewhere over south-western Washington State he jumped into the dark from the rear airstair.
The FBI searched the forests for weeks and investigated more than a thousand suspects in 45 years without naming a culprit. The only tangible trace turned up in 1980: a boy found three bundles of weathered twenty-dollar bills, $5,800 in all, on the bank of the Columbia River, with serial numbers from the ransom. Whether Cooper survived the jump is unknown.
The case contributed to the introduction of compulsory passenger screening in 1973 and to a technical modification that prevents the rear airstair of the Boeing 727 from being opened in flight. In 2016 the FBI ended its active investigation. It is the only unsolved aircraft hijacking in the history of American commercial aviation.