Mysterious man on the plane
On November 24, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, many Americans were spending time with their families or on vacation. On the NW305 flight from Portland to Seattle, a man wearing sunglasses got on the plane with a black suitcase. This man is not very good-looking, he is sitting in the tail of the plane, and he acts as a very polite gentleman.
No one paid special attention to him until a flight attendant brought him water, and the man gave the flight attendant a note. At first, the flight attendant thought it was a note to pick up a conversation. After all, he had received similar things before, so he put it in his pocket. But the man signaled her to take a look, and patted the black suitcase beside his feet, saying that there were bombs here.
The flight attendant immediately reported to the flight attendant, and the two opened a note that read: I have a bomb and I want to hijack the plane. Civil aviation at that time did not have such a strict security inspection system as it is today, and there was a real possibility that bombs could be brought onto the plane. The chief purser sat next to the man as required, and the man opened the black suitcase, which indeed seemed to contain a bomb. Since it was impossible to confirm the authenticity of the bomb with the naked eye, the purser did not dare to act rashly.
The man offered $200,000 in cash, 4 parachutes (2 main and 2 backup), and asked Seattle Airport to be ready to refuel. The purser immediately went to the cab to tell the captain that someone had hijacked the plane, and the captain informed the ground.
Hijacking and Escape
After receiving the news, the FBI immediately began to deploy, but the strategy of manipulating the parachute was rejected. The hijacker asked for 4 parachutes, then he was likely to parachute with the hostages. In order to ensure the safety of the passengers on the plane, they can only accept the conditions of the hijackers and prepare 200,000 registered cash in cash, and then look for opportunities to arrest them.
Portland is not far from Seattle, and the flight takes less than an hour. After the FBI was notified, there was not enough time to prepare, so the captain of the plane had to lie about a glitch and need to hover over the airport for a while. At that time, there were only more than 30 passengers on the plane, but except for the hijackers and crew members, no one knew that the hijacking incident was taking place, and the emotions of the passengers were basically stable.
At 17:39, the plane landed in Seattle. In order to prevent the police from sniping, the hijackers asked the plane to close all the visors after landing. He allowed and released the passengers and some of the crew on the plane. While the plane was refueling, FBI agents boarded the plane to offer cash and parachutes to the hijackers. After the plane was filled with fuel, it took off again at 19:46. The hijackers demanded to fly to Mexico City, and the flight altitude should be kept at one thousand feet (about three kilometers) and the speed should not exceed 150 knots (about 278 kilometers per hour). . This altitude is much lower than the normal civil aviation flight altitude, but it is very suitable for low-altitude skydiving.
After taking off again, the crew on the plane was asked to enter the cockpit, leaving only one hijacker in the cabin. Soon after, he opened the rear hatch, lowered the tailgate, put on a parachute, and jumped into the darkness with a black suitcase filled with bombs and cash.
Track and Search
That night, the FBI and police checked the ticket information for the flight and found that the hijacker had purchased the ticket with cash at the Portland airport counter, and the name of the ticket was Dan Cooper. Later, due to media misreporting, Dan Cooper was written as DB Cooper.
Although police sent fighter jets to follow the plane as soon as it took off again, Cooper seemed to have anticipated that and asked the plane to turn off all lights during the flight, making it more difficult to track. Taking into account the safety of the crew and the bad weather that day, the fighter plane was not close during the tracking process and did not find that the hijacker escaped by parachuting.
According to the captain's recollection, at 20:00 in the evening, the warning light on the instrument panel came on, and the rear hatch was opened. At this time, he also communicated with the hijacker through the telephone at the tail of the aircraft. Cooper asked him to reduce the flight speed so that he could open the tail. gangway. At 20:46, the captain felt a slight shudder in the tail of the plane as the plane was in the Lewis River basin, about 40 kilometers west of Portland. The police have delineated the search area accordingly, but even if the area is expanded, there is still no progress. The FBI launched two large-scale searches in the winter of 1971 and the spring of 1972, but they were unsuccessful.
new clues
The FBI researched the items left by Cooper and found that Cooper had strong anti-reconnaissance capabilities. In addition to 8 cigarette butts, he parachuted out of the black suitcase with the bomb, and even destroyed the one he wrote to the flight attendant. note. The fingerprints he left on the plane have never been matched in the fingerprint database.
Cooper had chatted with the flight attendant on the plane. The purser found that he was not only familiar with the route, but also knew the location of the military airfield. He was very familiar with the Boeing 727 he was flying in, and knew that there was a gangway at the rear. During the Vietnam War at the time, the Boeing 727 was the transport aircraft model used by the United States in the war, so the police suspected that Cooper might have served in the military, but no substantial evidence was found.
The FBI notified Bank of America of the ransom number and also announced the reward to the public. As long as Cooper spends the money, the police can track him down. But bizarrely, the banknotes never circulated in the market, which means that after Cooper got the money, he didn't spend a cent. As a result, many people began to wonder if Cooper fell to his death while skydiving, but the police did not find his body.
In February 1980, a boy found three bags of bills while playing on a small beach in southern Washington. After a number comparison, these banknotes were part of the ransom paid to Cooper that year, totaling $5,880. While this area is far beyond the search of the year, it is exciting to see that although the banknotes are rotten, the rubber bands that tie the banknotes are new. So does this mean that someone brought this batch of banknotes here recently? Can Cooper be found along this trail?
