Get Cooper

 

 

Fancy this: a man boards a plane (Boeing 727, to be exact), flying from Portland to Seattle, under the name Dan Cooper in the year 1971. As soon as the flight is airborne, he hands over a handwritten note to the air hostess declaring he has a bomb in the suitcase that he will detonate it if he wasn’t handed over $200,000 and four parachutes! That’s D.B. Copper for you – an alias, no one knows his real name – who proceeded to make all 36 passengers and two members of the flight crew alight at the Seattle Airport, leaving just four people in the plane, in exchange for the stated ransom (precise to $200,000 in $20 bills) and the chutes . People believe that this was his way of ensuring that he wouldn’t be caught up in a fake or malfunctioning parachute.

Now the ‘Rambo’ bit starts: Cooper instructed the pilots to fly to Mexico and keep the plane low (10,000 feet, when the cruising altitude is 25,000 feet) and slow (landing gear down flaps fully extended). With the money (weighing 21 pounds) strapped to his waist, he jumped out into the stormy night. Luckily, for him, he wasn’t spotted by the two Air force Fighters shadowing the plane.

This daring and outrageous robbery of celluloid proportions prompted the authorities to launch one of the most expensive and extensive manhunts in order to capture him, but precious little trace of him was ever found. However in 1980, $5,800 of the original loot was found rotting in the same area where Cooper had jumped out. This prompted speculation that he had died on landing. But even this cannot be confirmed as no body matching the stated description was ever found in the area. The legend of D.B. Cooper lives on as he remains famous and anonymous at the same time.