45 year old D.B. Cooper enters Portland International Airport. Cooper uses the name Dan Cooper to buy a one-way ticket to Sea-Tac International Airport on November 24, 1971, a Wednesday before Thanksgiving. He boards Northwest Flight 305, a Boeing 727-100. He boards the airplane and attracts no attention. He is wearing suit with a pearl tie and wearing a homburg hat. The airplane starts to taxi and take off from the runway. Flight attendant Flo Schaffner walks by and he hands her a note. Men traveling alone handed nots to flight attendants as a way to pass hotel and phone numbers. When she walked a second time, Cooper says to Schaffner, "You'd better read that. I have a bomb." From there, the hijacking starts. Schaffer then goes to the cockpit and notifies Captain William Scott. They are required to cooperate. He orders Schaffner to sit next to her. Cooper shows her briefcase. He also tells the pilot not to land, until the money and parachute are there for him to get. This is exchange for all the passengers on board, which amounts to $200,000.
As the hijacking happens, very few passengers knew what was going on. The airplane lands at Sea-Tac and demands it goes to Mexico City and flies slowly and at lower altitude. As the airplane is flying, two F-106 are dispatched to follow it, but it flies at Mach 2. The weather conditions were not great. He goes through the rear door of the Boeing 727 and parachutes out at around 8:05 PM. With him is the $200,000 money. From there, he is never seen again. Hijackings were very common in the 1960s and 70s. In fact two-thirds of them were recorded during that time period. They were mostly committed by political factions to skyjackings in which the hijacker wanted money. Hijackings back then did not result in airplane intentionally being crashed into a building, which happened on September 11, 2001, which claimed 3,000 lives. Then in 1980, a 8 year old boy found money which had matching serial numbers that Cooper had. Presumably, he either died in the Pacific Northwest forest or somehow survived and someone waited to pick him up. Years later, some people claimed to be D.B. Cooper, but none were every confirmed. A close one was in 2000 with Duane Cooper, but it came inconclusive. Nobody knows what really happened to him. D.B. Cooper remains the only unsolved hijacking to this day.
Crime Library-DB CooperUS News and World Report-DB CooperWikipedia-DB Cooper
