On November 24, 1971, a man who had bought his ticket under the name Dan Cooper — later misreported as “D.B. Cooper,” the name that stuck — hijacked Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727 flying from Portland to Seattle. Claiming to have a bomb in his briefcase, he demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. After the money and parachutes were delivered at Seattle, he released the passengers, ordered the crew to fly toward Mexico City with a refueling stop in Reno, and somewhere over southwest Washington lowered the rear stairs and jumped into the night. He was never seen again. No one aboard was harmed. In 1980, a boy raking sand on a Columbia River beach uncovered about $5,800 of the ransom cash, the only trace ever recovered. The FBI suspended its active investigation in 2016, leaving the case the only documented unsolved case of air piracy in commercial aviation history.
Sources
- Wikipedia — D. B. Cooper
- FBI — “D.B. Cooper Hijacking,” Famous Cases & Criminals (fbi.gov)