The Case of D. B. Cooper

Anna Malakhouskaya | October 10th, 2021

The hijacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 and subsequent manhunt for the hijacker Dan Cooper resulted in one of the largest investigations ever conducted by the FBI with the case being regarded as “one of the greatest unsolved mysteries in U.S history”(1). Many questions remain unanswered as to who the man was and whether he survived after jumping off the plane midair.

This mystery begins on Wednesday November 24, 1971 when a man going by the alias Dan Cooper bought a $20 one-way ticket from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington on Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305. Cooper was described as “a quiet man who appeared to be in his mid-40s, wearing a business suit with a black tie and white shirt”(2). At around 3:00 pm Cooper handed the stewardess a note stating he had a bomb in his briefcase. Cooper demanded that $200,000 exclusively in 20 dollar bills be put into a knapsack along with 4 parachutes and a fuel truck to be waiting at the airport when they landed.

After touching down in Seattle, Cooper released the 36 passengers in exchange for the parachutes and money. A few members of the crew were forced to stay on the plane and ordered to fly to Mexico City. At around 8:00 pm somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nevada, Cooper jumped from the plane via the rear door with 2 parachutes and the bag of money, never to be seen again. This detail has remained quite peculiar given that the pilot chose the route the plane would be flying, not Cooper. Cooper only requested the end destination be Mexico City, meaning that there was no predetermined drop site. This detail is particularly puzzling because all other elements of the hijacking seemed to have been meticulously planned up until the moment Cooper jumped from the plane.

The events that day sparked what the FBI described as “one of the longest and most exhaustive investigations”(3) in the organization's history. The case file came to be known as NORJAK for Northwest Hijacking and in the first 5 year of the investigation over 800 suspects were considered and most were eventually ruled out. In the early years of the case, Cooper was charged with Air Piracy, however, that charge has a statute of limitation of 5 years and so a grand jury was convened which indicted Cooper with violating the Hobbs act, a federal statute, with no statute of limitation, designed to prevent extortion (4).

There has been an incredibly long list of people put forth by the FBI as potential suspects. However, a popular theory and one that was supported by Larry Carr, the FBI special agent who took over the case in 2007, is that D.B Cooper did not survive the fall. Initially, it was theorized by the FBI that Cooper must have been an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper, but the longer the investigation dragged on, the clearer it became that this simply could not be true. For one thing, when Cooper jumped from the plane, only 1 of his chutes was fully functional -- one was a training chute that had been sewn shut -- and even the chute that was working was a military chute that was not steerable. In addition, at the time of Cooper’s jump, there was no viability of the ground due to cloud cover, it was pitch-black with 200-mile an hour winds and Cooper jumped into a wooded area wearing loafers and a trench coat (5). If you think that sounds incredibly dangerous and outright stupid, you would be a hundred percent correct; no experienced parachutist would jump in those conditions. But then again, if Cooper did fall to his death, where is his body and chute?

Regarding how the case came to be known as D.B Cooper, it is suspected that it was due to a clerical error or a journalist mishearing the name Dan Cooper, yet somehow the mistake stuck. In the end, after hundreds of leads, and even finding a paper bag on a beach North of Portland filled with $5,800 of the stolen money, no suspect has been apprehended. As of 2011, the NORJACK case file measured 40ft long and covered over 1000 suspects (6). The case was officially closed in 2016 and it seems as though the mystery of D.B Cooper will remain forever.