A person calling himself Dan Cooper, later becoming D.B. Cooper, has never been located after a bazarre escapade that remains history’s only unsolved commercial-airline hijacking. Photo from the FBI.

By Randal Hill
Guest Columnist

It was on a stormy Thanksgiving Eve in 1971 that a person who called himself Dan Cooper leaped into legend in a bizarre escapade that remains history’s only unsolved commercial-airline hijacking.

The night that changed aviation history began in Portland, Oregon, when a well-dressed 40ish man carrying a briefcase approached the flight counter of Northwest Orient Airlines and gave his name as Dan Cooper. (In Canada, “Dan Cooper” was a comic-book hero.) He became D. B. Cooper of popular culture later, when a reporter covering the hijacking mistyped the name from a police source.

Never asked to show identification or to open his briefcase, he paid cash for a one-way ticket on a Boeing 727 to nearby Seattle. As one of 37 passengers, he sat alone in the last row. Once airborne, Cooper passed a folded note to 23-year-old Florence Schaffner, an attractive steward accustomed to men hitting on her. When she tucked the unread message into her purse, the soft-spoken stranger said, “Miss, you’d better look at that note; I have a bomb.”

The note confirmed his threat, and Cooper ordered Schaffner to sit beside him. When she did, she asked to look inside the briefcase. There she saw a tangle of wires, a battery and six round red sticks. The passenger said that, once they landed in Seattle, he wanted $200,000 cash in a knapsack, as well as back and front parachutes. If his demands weren’t met, he warned, he would blow up the plane.

Schaffner took the note to the captain. When she returned, Cooper had donned wraparound sunglasses.

It was raining hard when the plane touched down in Seattle. The requested cash was brought onboard, the 727 was refueled, and the remaining passengers were released. The hijacker then ordered the captain to fly to Mexico City.

Cooper was obviously familiar with the aircraft. He ordered the pilot to fly the plane below 10,000 feet and with the wing flaps set at 15 degrees. (This would keep the 727 under 200 knots—230 miles an hour.) Cooper soon strapped the cash to himself, then slipped on the parachutes. He promised a frightened steward that he would dismantle the bomb or take it with him later, but he did neither.
Over the rugged terrain of southwestern Washington, he moved to the aft stairs, which allowed passengers to disembark from the rear of the airliner. He then leapt into the darkness amid a howling rainstorm and into an area of dense forests, canyons and white-water rapids. He was never seen again.

Rivaling an Alfred Hitchcock fantasy, the Cooper incident has achieved cult status in a Robin Hood sort of way. Never mind that the hijacker threatened to murder people, or that he made off with today’s equivalent of $1.5 million in cash.

Some folks have pronounced him a harebrained daredevil, jumping to certain death in the worst imaginable weather. Others, though, have maintained that D. B. Cooper deserves to be seen as a courageous establishment-beater who’s possibly still alive.