The Man Who Fell to Earth: D.B. Cooper and the Hijacking That Vanished Into Legend
- Danny Dutch
- Nov 24, 2022
- 6 min read
It all started on a grey Wednesday afternoon—24 November 1971—when a man walked into the Portland International Airport wearing a black suit, white shirt, narrow black tie, and carrying a briefcase. He was entirely unremarkable in appearance, described by witnesses as “mid-forties,” “businesslike,” and “polite.” At the counter for Northwest Orient Airlines, he gave his name as Dan Cooper and paid in cash for a one-way ticket on Flight 305 to Seattle. The trip would take just 30 minutes.
Back then, air travel in the United States was relatively casual. There were no security checks. No ID was required to purchase a ticket. People could smoke freely on board and drinks flowed liberally. And so it was that Dan Cooper, later misidentified in the press as D.B. Cooper, boarded the Boeing 727 and settled quietly into seat 18C at the rear of the plane.
He ordered a bourbon and soda and lit a cigarette. The flight attendants, including one named Florence Schaffner, assumed he was just another businessman on the go.
“Miss, You’d Better Look at That Note”
Not long into the flight, Schaffner walked by Cooper’s seat. He handed her a folded slip of paper. Expecting it to be the usual mid-air flirtation—a phone number or an awkward pick-up line—she slipped it into her pocket without looking. But Cooper leaned in calmly and said:
“Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”
Schaffner did. The message was written in felt-tip pen, all in block capitals:
“I have a bomb in my briefcase. I want you to sit next to me.”
She did as instructed. Cooper opened the briefcase just enough for her to glimpse what appeared to be eight red cylinders, wires, and a battery—enough to look convincingly like dynamite. There was no hysteria, no raised voice. Cooper remained calm and composed as he issued his demands:
“I want $200,000 by 5:00 p.m. In cash. Put in a knapsack. I want two back parachutes and two front parachutes. When we land, I want a fuel truck ready to refuel. No funny stuff or I’ll do the job.”
A Calm Cabin, an Unseen Crisis
Schaffner relayed the demands to the pilot in the cockpit. Meanwhile, passengers remained entirely unaware of what was happening behind them. The crew informed them only that there was a minor mechanical problem, and they would be circling the airport for a little while.
Across the aisle from Cooper sat 20-year-old Bill Mitchell, a student at the University of Oregon. He noticed nothing suspicious—just that the flight attendant seemed to be paying an awful lot of attention to the quiet, older man across the aisle.
“My ego got in the way of this,” Mitchell admitted in 2019. “It sort of bugged me that this flight attendant was talking with this older guy with a suit and smoking, and here you had a University of Oregon sophomore sitting right across the aisle and she wouldn’t make any eye contact or anything.”
Despite the close proximity, Mitchell had no idea he was sitting just feet away from one of the most audacious criminals in U.S. history. But he would later be instrumental in helping the FBI piece together a sketch of the suspect.
As the plane circled in the air for about two hours, officials on the ground scrambled to satisfy D.B. Cooper’s demands. The plane landed in Seattle at 5:39 p.m. Around that time, the airline staff approached Cooper with the money and the parachutes.
The first two parachutes were provided by McChord Air Force Base. After receiving them, Cooper demanded two more. Perhaps the first parachutes wouldn’t have worked for his mission — they were military-grade, and the chutes would open after a 200-foot fall.
But the second set of parachutes were sports parachutes, brought from a nearby skydiving field. These would allow someone to free-fall for several thousand feet before the parachute opened.
At this point, the hijacker released the 36 passengers. He also let two crew members go, including Florence Schaffner. Then, D.B. Cooper told the pilot he wanted to fly to Mexico City. But the plane did not have the range to fly 2,200 miles to this destination, so Cooper agreed with the pilot to make a refuelling stop in Reno along the way.
Before they took off, he laid out specific demands for the flight. They must fly below 10,000 feet, with the wing flaps at 15 degrees, and keep the speed slower than 200 knots. And the rear door was to remain open.
As the plane rose into the sky around 7:40 p.m., several Air Force jets followed at a stealthy distance. Cooper sent the crew to the cockpit as it became deeply cold inside the plane. The four crew members on board later claimed that the temperature dropped to below zero.
Then, at 8:00 p.m., a warning light flashed in the cockpit, notifying them that the rear airstairs had been lowered. About 15 minutes later, the crew members noticed a sudden upward motion from the back of the plane. They remained huddled together, freezing, for nearly two hours.
Upon landing in Reno around 10:15 p.m., the plane was immediately surrounded by the local police and the FBI. They entered the plane and searched it from nose to tail. But there was no sign of D.B. Cooper — or the stolen money. Authorities were convinced that the hijacker could not have exited the plane on the ground without anyone seeing him.
The Manhunt Begins: Operation NORJAK
The FBI called it Operation NORJAK (Northwest Hijacking), and it quickly became one of the most exhaustive investigations in American law enforcement history. Agents interviewed over 800 suspects in the first five years. Dozens of promising leads came to nothing.
Lead agent Ralph Himmelsbach recalled:
“Real, real good ones; real, real poor ones. A lot of both. And many in between.”
In 1980, a glimmer of hope surfaced. An 8-year-old boy named Brian Ingram was digging a fire pit on the banks of the Columbia River when he uncovered three bundles of decaying twenty-dollar bills—totalling $5,880. The serial numbers matched the ransom money. But the find only deepened the mystery. How had the money got there? Why only part of it? And where was the rest?
Theories, Suspects, and Dead Ends
Over the years, several suspects rose to notoriety.
Richard McCoy, a former Army helicopter pilot, hijacked a plane in 1972 in a remarkably similar manner and parachuted out with $500,000. But he didn’t match the FBI’s composite sketch or witness descriptions and was eventually ruled out.
Robert Rackstraw, a decorated Vietnam veteran with parachute training, became another suspect. His alleged links to CIA operations, military expertise, and cryptic messages sent to newspapers drew attention. Filmmaker Thomas Colbert remains convinced Rackstraw was Cooper, saying:
“[The FBI is] stonewalling and covering up Rackstraw’s tracks due to his possible ties to the CIA.”
But journalist Geoffrey Gray, author of Skyjack, disagrees. He doesn’t even include Rackstraw in his book.
DNA lifted from Cooper’s tie in 2001 helped eliminate more suspects, including Duane Weber, who had claimed to be Cooper on his deathbed. Another potential hijacker, Kenneth Christiansen, was a trained paratrooper, but also didn’t match the physical description.
By 2007, even the FBI was rethinking its assumptions. Agent Larry Carr, who had taken over the case, admitted:
“We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper. We concluded after a few years this was simply not true… No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky.”
A Legend Cemented in Pop Culture
Despite the dead ends, Cooper’s legacy endured. He became a cult figure—a kind of modern-day outlaw. Songs were written. Films made. The mystery seeped into pop culture, with perhaps the most enduring reference being FBI Special Agent Dale Bartholomew Cooper in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks.
And the amateur sleuths—dubbed “Cooperites”—kept digging. They pore over flight records, analyse parachute design, debate skydiving physics, and argue over maps. Entire conferences, like “CooperCon,” are now dedicated to the man who disappeared into legend.
The FBI Closes the Case—But Not the Mystery
In July 2016, after nearly 45 years, the FBI announced it was closing the active investigation.
“Following one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations in our history,” the Bureau said, “the FBI redirected resources allocated to the D.B. Cooper case in order to focus on other investigative priorities.”
But they left a sliver of hope: if anyone finds physical evidence—money, a parachute, clothing—they should contact their nearest field office.
In truth, the case is no longer just a crime story. It’s an American myth. Whether D.B. Cooper survived the jump or perished in the woods remains unknown. Perhaps his bones lie scattered in some forgotten corner of the Pacific Northwest. Or maybe, as Larry Carr once suggested, it’ll all come down to someone who “just remembers that odd uncle.”
Until then, the legend of D.B. Cooper endures—aloof, airborne, and just out of reach.
