D.B. Cooper Jumped Out of a Plane and Vanished

The afternoon before Thanksgiving, 1971. A man in a dark suit, white shirt, and clip-on black tie walked up to the Northwest Orient Airlines counter at Portland International Airport. He bought a one-way ticket to Seattle under the name Dan Cooper. He paid cash. $20.

He boarded Flight 305, a Boeing 727, took seat 18C in the back row, ordered a bourbon and soda, and lit a cigarette. He looked like any other business traveller.

Then he handed the flight attendant a note.

"I have a bomb. I want $200,000."

Florence Schaffner, the flight attendant, initially assumed the note was a man's phone number and slipped it into her pocket without reading it. Cooper leaned over and whispered: "Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb."

She read it. He opened his briefcase and showed her a tangle of red cylinders and wires. She walked to the cockpit.

The plane landed in Seattle. Cooper released the 36 passengers in exchange for $200,000 in unmarked $20 bills, four parachutes, and a fuel truck. He kept the flight crew on board. He ordered the pilots to fly to Mexico City at minimum speed, below 10,000 feet, with the landing gear down and the rear staircase lowered.

Somewhere over the dense forests of southwest Washington, in a freezing rainstorm, with winds howling at 200 mph and temperatures at -7C, Dan Cooper lowered the aft staircase of the Boeing 727 and jumped into the night.

He was never seen again.

No body. No parachute. No briefcase. The FBI spent 45 years investigating and never charged a single suspect. In 2016, they officially suspended the case — the only unsolved airline hijacking in American history.