Background
24 November 1971 was the day before Thanksgiving. On Northwest Orient Flight 305, a short Boeing 727 service from Portland to Seattle, a passenger who bought his ticket as "Dan Cooper" took seat 18-E. There were 36 passengers (including him) and six crew. A reporting error spread the name "D. B. Cooper," which became the case's name.
The planned destination was Seattle, but Cooper demanded that the plane fly on to Mexico City, refuelling at Reno. Other passengers and crew learned the scale of the incident only afterwards.
What happened
Cooper told a flight attendant that his briefcase held a bomb and demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. The FBI recorded the bills' serial numbers on microfilm before handing them over. In Seattle the passengers were released and the plane took off again for Mexico; Cooper told the crew to fly low and slow with the landing gear down and the cabin unpressurised.
He jumped from the rear airstair over southwest Washington, probably around 8:13 p.m., when the tail suddenly pitched upward. Agents later found one main parachute and one opened reserve left in the aircraft.
One of the four parachutes given to Cooper was a non-functional training parachute sewn shut. It was never found and may have been used to carry the money. The ransom consisted of 10,000 twenty-dollar bills.
Investigation and legal outcome
The FBI investigated for 45 years and examined more than 1,000 serious suspects; the case file runs to 66 volumes. On 10 February 1980 an eight-year-old boy found about $6,000 of the ransom at Tina Bar on the Columbia River, the only confirmed evidence of the crime outside the plane. A 2020 analysis suggested the money entered the water months after the hijacking.
In July 2016 the FBI suspended its active investigation. No suspect has ever been charged or convicted.
Many people have been named as suspects over the years, but no conclusive evidence has been presented against any of them, so their names are not listed here.
Where it stands today
Whether Cooper survived the jump is unknown. The FBI considered the conditions of the jump extremely hazardous. The case remains the only documented unsolved air piracy in commercial aviation history, and it led to design changes preventing aft airstairs from being opened in flight.