D.B. Cooper: The Hijacker Who Jumped into the Night and Never Landed

2026-07-19 · Vanished Without a Trace · 8 min read

On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a man in a dark business suit paid cash for a one way ticket at the Northwest Orient counter in Portland, Oregon. He signed the ticket Dan Cooper and took a seat near the back of Flight 305, a Boeing 727 on a short hop north to Seattle. Passengers and crew described him as a quiet, olive skinned man in his mid forties, in a black clip on tie, raincoat and loafers, carrying a briefcase. He ordered a bourbon and soda, lit a cigarette, and handed a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner. She assumed it was a lonely businessman passing along his phone number and dropped it into her purse unread. He leaned toward her. "Miss, you'd better look at that note," he said. "I have a bomb." When she sat down beside him he opened the briefcase just far enough to show a tangle of wires, red cylinders and a battery.

His demands were exact: $200,000 in twenty dollar bills, ten thousand notes worth well over a million dollars in today's money, plus four parachutes, waiting when the aircraft landed in Seattle. Captain William Scott relayed the message to the ground, and Northwest Orient's president authorized payment. The plane held over Puget Sound for about two hours while the airline gathered the cash from a Seattle bank and the FBI photographed every single bill to record its serial number, while the passengers were told only that a minor mechanical problem had caused the delay.

Reader comments (0)