The D. B. Cooper hijacking
Oregon and Washington, United States, 1971
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, the eve of Thanksgiving, a man who registered as "Dan Cooper" paid cash for a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. He wore a dark suit, white shirt and black tie, sat in seat 18E, in the last row, and shortly after takeoff handed a flight attendant a note saying he had a bomb in his briefcase. He showed wires and red cylinders and asked for $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes.
The plane circled for about two hours while the FBI gathered the ransom, whose serial numbers were photographed on microfilm, and the parachutes, which came from a local pilot and a skydiving school. In Seattle, he traded the 36 passengers for the money and ordered the plane to take off for Mexico, with a stop in Reno, slowly, at no more than 10,000 feet, with the landing gear down and flaps at 15 degrees. At around 8:13 pm, over southwestern Washington, at night and in the rain, he jumped out the rear stairs of the Boeing 727. He left behind on the plane his clip-on tie and one main parachute; one of the reserves he had been given was a training one, stitched shut.
Sources
In the game
Ten Thousand Feet
Seattle, Friday, November 26, 1971, 10 pm. On Wednesday, the eve of Thanksgiving, a man in a dark suit, dark glasses and slick black hair boarded Cascade Pacific flight 412 in Portland and showed a flight attendant a bomb in his briefcase.
Searches of the forests near the Lewis River found neither the man, the parachute nor the money. In February 1980, an eight-year-old boy dug up three decayed bundles of ransom bills, about $5,800, on the bank of the Columbia River, the only evidence found away from the plane. The FBI questioned hundreds of suspects over 45 years and suspended the active investigation in July 2016 without identifying the hijacker, and the case remains the only unsolved air piracy in American commercial aviation.
