Most DB Cooper references I've read consider him to be some cross between a folk-hero and lovable-rogue due to the audacity of his crime, lack of harm to civilians, and the idea that he might have actually gotten away with it.
But fascinating to read the Wikipedia entry and realize that DB Cooper, and the no less than 15 copycat "parachute hijackings" he inspired in the same year, created a watershed moment in Airport Security that accelerated our steady march to today's over bearing TSA:
"In all, 15 hijackings similar to Cooper's—all unsuccessful—were attempted in 1972.[130] With the advent of universal luggage searches in 1973 (see Airport security) the general incidence of hijackings dropped precipitously.[131]"
It also helped that Boeing fitting the 727 with a "Cooper Lock" for the rear loading hatch. Basically a latch with a wind vane that once enough airflow moved over it, it would auto lock the hatch from the outside and thus couldn't be opened in flight. If I remember correctly.
Interestingly, there's evidence that the CIA knew about -- and perhaps utilized -- the Boeing 727's latent air drop capabilities as part of Air America.[0]
Navy SEALs have had that operational capability, as detailed by Chuck Pfarrer (and others) in his book Warrior Soul. (The "Beginning" sample on Amazon contains the text, if anyone's interested in reading it.)
Before all those hijackings, there was no airport security screening. None at all! I know that's hard to believe, but we've all gotten used to it since we've had something in place now for about 40 years.
There has to be something we can do to ensure safety, but that's less overbearing than today's TSA.
The world is a dangerous place, absolute safety is an unachievable pipe dream. The only thing we an ensuring is that that we have our rights violated and our time wasted by government agents that we pay for.
If we really wanted to be safer, we'd stop creating droves of new enemies every day in our pursuit of global military empire. Most of my fellow Americans remain blissfully unaware that we are bombing people, arming jihadists, and backing dictators every day, but the people getting bombed and oppressed are quite aware of what is what.
Its inevitable that we are going to continue facing blowback for our actions, but unfortunately its heresy for the masters of conventional wisdom to admit that their policies make life more dangerous for everyone.
There still isn't for non-international flights in New Zealand. Show up at the airport 15 minutes before your flight, check your luggage, print your ticket, and walk to your gate.
The security at Ben Gurion does a cursory "I'm looking at your bags" check but they mostly just profile people by asking them questions and looking at their responses. There's something like 4 or 5 points of contact with a security team member where they just ask questions. Once they suspect someone due to how they've reacted or answered poorly, then they divert people away that section of the airport and continue business as normal. They also have a curb-to-airplane average time of something like 25 minutes.
Before 2001, I'd always ask the pilots to let me sit in the cockpit during takeoff. If they said no, they'd often offer a tour of the cockpit when cruising instead.
I think at this point we have all the technology to replace most air travel with a network of autonomous family-sized aircraft hopping between cities within a few hundred miles, probably not costing much more than a Greyhound ticket.
Then the big security threat shifts from what a hijacker can do with a jet packed full of humans and fuel to what a hacker can do by seizing control of the whole network, but the travel experience itself wouldn't need such invasive screening.
And if it took any longer, I'd make this journey even less.
302,382 people flew from SFO to Europe in May 2016. That's a lot of people. Almost 5% of the Bay Area population and there are 2 more international airports in the region. [0]
Collectively far more people are flying from San Francisco to Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Portland, and Seattle each month. If they could all show up at the airport 5 minutes early, hop in a tiny drone-jet with 3-4 other passengers and take off, not having to deal with security would be icing on the cake in terms of convenience.
I don't think the parent was suggesting that his idea should be the only solution... just that it would be a solution that would work for many use cases (and could exist in combination with larger long haul flights).
Another tactic that might help would be completely separating checked baggage from passenger flights. I.e. you check your bags the day before and they go on a cargo network. More time for screening, cargo planes are less valuable targets (although they still have been attacked), cargo containers could be armored, and passenger-only planes would be easier to secure since the only way to smuggle something would be on your person or in your body.
Even if you could theoretically reduce airport connection time to zero between flights, a lot of time is spent just getting the aircraft to speed, and slowing down to land (all that gravitational potential energy has to go somewhere, after all).
Same principle applies to express trains, and dwell times at stations. The benefit of high speed is lost just decelerating and accelerating from every stop it has to make.
Go watch Total Recall, the scene where he walks past the security detail which the skeletal outline. Pretty sure we will get there. There is no reason a computer cannot real time draw an inoffensive view of any person and item moving past. https://youtu.be/7CX9Agzeh-c
How about getting on a bus? Getting on a train? How about walking on the street next to people whose backpacks haven't been inspected? Should we put x-ray detectors on every street corner, next to the security cameras we already have?
Depends on the blast size and location. There have been a lot of failed attempts to down aircraft. Ex: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bojinka_plot The only bomb they detonated killed one person on an aircraft in flight.
If you survive a 'successful' blast at ground level, you survive. If you survive a 'successful' blast at 39,000 feet, your problems are just beginning.
>The bomb only created a relatively small hole in the plane's fuselage, however, and the aircraft was able to return to Mogadishu and land safely. Somali authorities now believe that they know who carried the bomb onto the plane and detonated it: A man who was then sucked out of the hole in the fuselage and became the attack's only fatality. (Only two minor injuries were reported among other passengers and crew.)
"Passengers on a Daallo Airlines flight leaving from Mogadishu were subjected to just about the most terrifying experience imaginable on Tuesday as a bomb exploded in the plane's passenger cabin somewhere above 12,000 feet."
Note that while 12,000 feet is well above sea level, it's only 4,000 feet above effective internal cabin altitude of 8,000'. So the fuselage stresses are vastly lower than those at 29,000'. The pressure differential is about 10 pa (pascals), vs. about 40 pa at 29,000'. That's roughly 1.5 psi vs. 11.5 psi -- there's nearly 10x the pressure differential at FL29.
Commercial aircraft don't equalize pressure quite like that. The assent is often far to rapid for passenger comfort so try to spread it out over a wider range. But, also the verify the system is working. http://aerosavvy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/altitude-gra...
12,000' probably has an internal cabin pressure of around 3,000' to 3,500' and of course it's unlikely to be at exactly 12,000' during detonation.
It's like saying a rope that's living 500 pounds is under 5x the load as one lifting 100 pounds while ignoring it's designed to lift cars. And for a rather extreme example: http://www.aloha.net/~icarus/index.htm 30' just gone.
Much depends on the specifics of the void, how it was formed, what structures are compromised, particularly control structures, contribution from metal fatigue or other factors, etc., etc., etc.
There have been some spectacularly involved structural failures, with Aloha Airlines 243 perhaps the most impressive of these.
1. No major structural members were involved. The aircrafts main beams run beneath the cabin and cargo floors. As it was, loss of structural integrity of the outer envelope introduced significant additional flex to the airframe which the pilots had to compensate for.
2. No critical control systems were involved. In the Pan Am 103 case, steering cables were severed.
3. There was no internal overpressure or extended hull damage. In AA243, the initial rupture was the result of corrosive metal fatigue and delamination of the outer skin.
I don't disagree with that except modern fly by wire systems involve redundant cabling so it's much harder to cut them all. But, yes if you know the weak points and have unrestricted access a few pounds of High explosive is enough.
The point is without that knowledge and access by the time you have enough HE to take down a modern jumbo jet you can also use it to kill a very large number of people in other ways.
Remember, most bombings are really poorly executed at a technical level. Army's use grenades because they work. If you want to do as much damage to a crowd as possible your better off with a large number of fragmentation grenades than a suicide vest. Create a choke point, detonate something to create a crush, blow up the densely packed crowd.
It's a lot harder to murder hundreds of people with a bomb elsewhere. It's possible (eg, Timothy McVeigh) but you need a much bigger bomb. Nobody wants something like Lockerbie to be easy.
Pre-9/11, pre-Richard Reid airport security was generally sensible and not too much of a burden.
> It's a lot harder to murder hundreds of people with a bomb elsewhere
Not really. Honestly the best places are probably TSA checkpoints considering how slow and clogged they get. In almost any amusement park during the summer (one of the reasons Disney searches all bags and has undercover security everywhere). Time Square at various times.
Yes exploding on a plane likely kills 100+ at once but in all honestly I would imagine it's far easier to do it elsewhere you just might need a tiny bit more explosive material.
And now I'm thoroughly depressed. Life is so fragile...well on the scale I care about.
That's not borne out by actual attacks. The recent airport bombings didn't kill as many people as a single airplane. I'm tempted to blame it on incompetence, but we shouldn't deny the facts.
Are you sure? The majority of largest terrorist attacks, casualty wise, didn't even involve a plane except for September 11th attacks (obviously several did but not the majority) [1].
> The recent airport bombings didn't kill as many people as a single airplane. I'm tempted to blame it on incompetence, but we shouldn't deny the facts.
That airport bombing was very different than the suggested TSA security line hypothetical as the airports in Istanbul work fundamentally different (I addressed in the other comment).
What facts am I denying? I always try to base my opinion around only facts.
Sorry not accusing you of denying facts. I was referring to my suggestion that bombings at security lines were less fatal due to incompetence. As in, I agree that security lines should be high-fatality, but in reality it seems attackers have problems carrying it out.
Airplanes might not be targeted as much, but that wiki link shows they are the most deadly per bomb. The other high-fatality bombings were multiple bombs.
In the end, my point is that despite the concern for security lines, they don't seem to end up being the massive disaster they could be. Certainly they are not worse than the airplane attacks they seek to prevent, which is the main point.
We have evidence that it's much harder though -- Just last month, 3 terrorists with automatic weapons and suicide bombs tried to inflict as much damage as possible and "only" killed 45 people in Istanbul. The Lockerbie bomber used a small cassette player filled with Semtex to kill 243 people -- aided by 90,000kg of jet fuel and 31,000ft of gravity.
If those terrorists showed up to a US security line (Which, unlike Istanbul, does not check for weapons at the entrance to the airport), the casualty count would have been far higher.
> Just last month, 3 terrorists with automatic weapons and suicide bombs tried to inflict as much damage as possible and "only" killed 45 people in Istanbul.
Fundamentally different than the TSA lines I referenced. In Istanbul they have two security checkpoints, one brief one at the entrance to the airport itself and another further in similar to the TSA. The attackers mostly pushed their way through the first one and it ended up being a choke point for them. They didn't get near where the bulk of the people were.
> The Lockerbie bomber used a small cassette player filled with Semtex to kill 243 people -- aided by 90,000kg of jet fuel and 31,000ft of gravity.
Hence why I didn't discount it. Attempting to brings explosives onto a plane and setting them off seems like a far more difficult task than doing it in an area with a similar people concentration and zero people checking your bags.
It's not about the body count. It's about instilling fear and confidence in the government.
The US government's approach is pretty obvious is to attempt to prevent attacks through various means (reducing risks at airpoint checkpoints, keeping tabs on ammonium nitrate sales, etc), pursing investigations of people deemed vulnerable to terrorist manipulation, and blunting the impact of anything that does happen. When you watch the public coverage when something happens, there's a few common narratives, and they are always focused on portraying the offenders as loners who "aren't taking orders" from anyone.
Jet fuel played a negligible role in the Lockerbie attacks, other than elevating the target to where pressure and airstream would rip the hull to shreds.
The initial bomb damage was a 50cm (20in) hole. Disruption of control systems (steering and stabilizer cables) lead to a pitch of the aircraft, aerodynamic forces of a 500kph (313 kn) airstream tore off the nose of the aircraft, parts of which impacted with and initiated further disintegration of trailing portions.
Again: fuel did not contribute to the damage inflicted on the aircraft.
I'm sure NYC would be perfectly willing to have the right to search all people entering the city (or at least Manhattan, which has a limited set of entry points, so it's easier to check). The Democrats could be convinced with a gun violence argument ("all those guns used to come from nearby states with more lax gun laws, but now we can stop them!"), and the Republicans of course would be satisfied with a bit of talk about terrorism.
> I'm sure NYC would be perfectly willing to have the right to search all people entering the city (or at least Manhattan...
Uh absolutely not. Nobody who lives in the city would vote for that, ESPECIALLY if it was just for Manhattan (since most people in Manhattan during the day don't live there).
NYC transit, much of the time, is a relatively well-oiled machine and introducing a huge delay like that would make the city explode in anger.
NYPD already has some "checkpoints" setup outside of certain subway entrances where they "randomly" (you can probably guess how random it is) pull people off to check their baggage.
Rarely do they check more than 1/1000 people entering the subway (and that's being extremely generous, it's probably far less frequent), because there might literally be a riot if they backed up an entire subway station checking everyone entering.
NYC transit, much of the time, is a relatively well-oiled machine and introducing a huge delay like that would make the city explode in anger.
Yeah, I don't think the guy you replied to is familiar with Manhattan at all, otherwise he wouldn't have said "a limited set of entry points".
I just counted 16 different subway lines entering Manhattan. And that's only counting "1" for each line the MTA map groups together. And that's not counting the PATH trains. Or all the trains that come into Penn Station. Or all the trains that come into Grand Central.
Then there are the bridges. Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburgh, 59th street, Triborough, George Washington. Probably a few smaller ones up in the Bronx that I'm forgetting.
Then there is the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the Queens Midtown Tunnel. Others?
Oh, and there are countless ferries crossing the Hudson River and the East River. Plus the Staten Island Ferry.
And some heliports.
I've forgotten half of it, since I haven't lived there in 40+ years. And my names are probably obsolete. I know that one of those structures was renamed after Ed Koch, but probably nobody in NYC uses that name.
You can certainly enumerate them all if you tried hard enough. So, definitely "a limited set of entry points".
It would be more informative to say "a large and very busy set of entry points".
> I know that one of those structures was renamed after Ed Koch
Just in case it was bugging you: The 59th St bridge is officially the "Ed Koch Queensboro bridge," but totally correct that nobody calls it that. Sometimes you'll hear it called "Queensboro bridge," though.
They also keep trying to get everyone to call the Triborough bridge "RFK bridge" (they even officially renamed the bridge), but I think it'll be a cold day in hell before people actually start using that name.
I get where you are coming from. I don't think that having x-ray detectors for plane luggage gives the passengers much safety: they could always use whatever weapon/bomb at the security line anyway!
I do, however, think that it's important not to let those people onto planes in contrast to buses, street corners, etc. because otherwise someone might take control of an entire plane, which can do a lot more damage than a bomb/pistol/etc, you know?
In fairness, you can kill more people with a smaller bomb by detonating it in flight than just about anywhere. This is simply because airplanes are dense with people and very delicate. Given the cheapness and minimal passenger disruption from x-ray inspection of checked baggage, it seems like a no-brainer.
How much damage is done to searched bags, and how many items have been stolen by the searchers? More or less than the damage a terrorist would cause? I'm trying to say that searching bags is more expensive and more disruptive than you are trying to argue
Well, first note that you have to compare the current costs of scanning to the counterfactual where there is no scanning and terrorists know it. I'd wager we'd have at least a few bombing per year. (Planes seem to be a high-visibility target, and the US gets various random bombings on a yearly basis.) The cost of a downed passenger plane is of order $2 billion, using the statistical value of $10 million per life in the US.
So those are some very rough numbers, but I think they will come out favoring screening. I'd be very interested in the calculation if you'd like to try to be more exact! The hardest part will be estimating the counterfactual bombing rate, but I bet the FBI has expert estimates of this somewhere.
I'd rather not die in a car crash, but that doesn't mean I'd pay an extra $10,000 for a car that reduced the risk of dying in a crash by 1%. You can't avoid putting an effective price on life, and in the US it's about $10 million.
What happens when the pilots need to use the bathroom? This has always bothered me when people talk about reinforced cockpit doors as a cure-all for hijackings.
In addition, there is a protocol for this. The pilot will contact the flight attendant working in the front of the plane. The flight attendant will lock a beverage cart in front of the bathrooms, creating a (heavy, but not immovable) barrier between the cockpit and bathroom, and the rest of the plane. The flight attendant stands behind the cart, watching the passengers. The pilot looks through the peep hole, and when it is clear, comes out, locking the cockpit door behind him/herself. After using the rest room, the pilot knocks on the door to ask the copilot to open it. The peep hold is used to be sure the flight attendant is still standing guard and everything is normal.
There are obviously some risks here, as the door is opened briefly twice, but there are a number of steps taken to minimize this risk.
The biggest realized risk seems to have been Germanwings Flight 9525. A suicidal co-pilot waited until the Captain left the cockpit. Then he locked the door and flew the plane into the side of a mountain.
I'm curious - is this a 'known and standard' protocol adopted universally across many airlines? Or how do you know this? I guess I'm thinking that if this is 'known and standard' it may also be possible to design an attack against it.
This introduces a new risk, that of sabotage by airline personnel themselves. As in the case of the Germanwings intentional downing by what's now thought to be a mentally ill co-pilot. He'd locked the captain outside the cabin.
Protocols to ensure two crew members in the cockpit at all times are now being considered.
There was an exceptionally good essay on implications of this incident, with computer/systems security implications, though I cannot locate it. James Fallows' Atlantic piece was good, though not quite what I was looking for.
I think if the alternative is a psycho/collection of psychos gaining access to the cockpit, a puddle/pile on the floor is a reasonable outcome in that situation.
Interesting point; are there protocols in place to prevent a terrorist on board a plane from entering the cockpit at all costs? e.g. if they start executing passengers, threaten to blow up the plane, etc?
It may be mandated, or company policy, but ultimately it's up to the pilots. Cockpits seem to have quite a bit of security since 9/11[1], with the ability of crew to enter after a 30 second delay if there is not a denial by someone within the cockpit, and the doors are supposedly rated to withstand a grenade.
As we've seen, a plane can be devastating when used as a weapon, so I think it is sensible to deny terrorists to the cockpit at the expense of the passengers. Theoretically, there are few situations where passengers can be forcibly restrained, since they should outnumber any people trying to seize the plane by quite a bit, passengers could (and have[2]) attempted to neutralize the threat themselves (as they understand the possible consequences of waiting out the situation in this era where the goal is not money, but chaos).
The cockpit doors have been locked since Sept 12, 2001. It is impossible to open them from the outside without very heavy machinery that could not be operated by a passenger, and even then it can take over half an hour.
Even if we did away with security entirely and let people carry guns on board, there would be literally zero risk of a hijacked plane in the US thanks to the locked doors. (There might be other reasons not to do that, but hijacking fears are not one of them).
And even then, it's arguable that this would still be impossible. 9/11 happened because hijacking protocol never took into account the possibility that the hijackers would use the plane itself as a weapon. The people on the final hijacked plane on 9/11 did know this, because they received calls about the WTC, so they fought back and forced the plane to crash, thwarting the hijackers' plans.
Before airport security, attacks on airplanes were rampant. Introducing basic screening cut that way down.
There is a happy medium between TSA molestation and not even attempting to stop the most obvious attempts to bring bombs and weapons. It's interesting and strange to me that so many people react so badly to the TSA that they want to do away with this stuff altogether. I wonder if they realize how frequent incidents were back before airport security.
Were they though? Outside of the 69-71 era there were only a dozen or two per year. How many of those could be prevented simply by locking the doors and not giving in?
I've had significantly more damage done to my belongs because they were searched than what terrorists have done.
Why exclude the era where hijackings became so common that the authorities decided they had to implement security screenings to combat them? That seems like a rather relevant timeframe to me!
In that period, there was an average of something like 30-40 per year in the US. And air travel has increased substantially since then, so if we saw that rate today it would be more like 60-100 per year, or one every few days. Looking at it another way, about one in 100,000 flights were hijacked, compare that to the modern rate of fatal crashes of somewhere around one in 10 million to one in 100 million. (The number is very approximate because not enough crashes happen to get an accurate idea of the risk anymore.)
Now, hijacking don't have to be fatal, but they also don't have to be safe. Even a fairly small fatality rate (for a hostage situation) would catapult air travel from the safest mode of transportation available to the most dangerous. And people like blowing stuff up too. If anyone can build a big pipe bomb and bring it onto an airplane with no risk of being caught, the rate of exploding airliners would look more like that old hijacking rate than the modern rate of essentially indistinguishable from zero.
Airliners are easy and attractive targets. You get a lot more bang for your buck there. For example, the bombs used at the Boston Marathon would have killed a couple hundred people on an airplane, versus three people when detonated on the street.
I see no evidence that the increased screening measures since 2001 have helped things at all. But it seems crazy to me to argue for zero security. We tried that, it worked poorly, and basic x-ray machines and metal detectors cut the rate way down.
1. Is tremendously fragile. It's an inflated sausage with a fragile skin, with half its takeoff weight as highly flamable, very high-energy fuel, soaring at altitudes and speeds which will almost certainly tear it to pieces, more particularly if control systems are affected, from even a modest blast. You'd need tens to thousands of times as much explosive to do remotely similar damage on ground.
2. Survivors of any initial blast are unlikely to survive subsequent developments.
3. Of their nature, airline passengers tend towards the wealthy and influential: businesspeople, legislators, and others with significant responsibility and importance within social structures.
4. The vehicle itself can be used as a weapon in ways few other vehicles can. A bomb used to direct an aircraft to a specific destination becomes a tremendous lever (as in 9/11).
The bomb which brought down Pan Am 103 (the Lockerbie incident) weighed a few ounces. The bomb Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols constructed for the Oklahoma City attack weighed 7,000 lb and filled a truck.
The Boston Marathon bombing involved two devices, several kilograms each. Three people were killed. Yes, 264 others were injured, some quite seriously. But the same explosives divided, say, amongst a number of aircraft could have killed many hundreds, possibly 1,000 or more.
Yes, highly strategic explosives placement might be able to disrupt other sites or forms of infrastructure. But the physical, medical, economic, social, and symbolic impacts of few other attacks are as high as those on aircraft.
I'd be vastly more tolerant of security searches if they were ONLY for security (bombs) and would not report or confiscate drugs, cash, or potentially, weapons other than bombs-vs-this-aircraft.
From what I've heard, Israeli nightclub searches are sort of like that -- drugs and such are fine (even though banned/illegal), but no weapons.
My understanding (possibly mistaken) is that checked baggage was NOT X-Rayed until after 9/11. I remember at the time one of the "fixes" was to X-Ray checked bags, and I remember being stunned to find out they simply hadn't bothered before.
I was pretty young then but I think all luggage did get x-rayed and you walked through a metal detector. the new things are liquid restrictions, removing shoes, etc
If they didn't x-ray carry-on, ask yourself this, why didn't the hijackers just bring AK-47's in their briefcases.
That may not be far off. It seems to me like the simplest explanation is that he was injured during the jump and died sometime later, with his body never being found. So he managed to conceal himself and died where no one could find him.
The problem with the hypothesis DB Cooper died is that, where was the corresponding missing person report a few days later? The FBI profilers think that the hijacker held a job, and that's why he picked the day leading into a four day weekend; so he had time to return to the job without raising suspicion. Assuming that's an accurate profile, then surely at least one person (workmate or family member) would file a missing person report within days of the hijacking. But there's no mention of this on the DB Cooper wiki page.
"She said staff time and manpower devoted to the case is diverting from programs that more urgently need attention, so the FBI decided to close its active investigation."
I'm surprised they don't have an (even unannounced) THX-1138 style limit on how much effort they spend on a single suspect. My wife had her purse stolen and about $10,000 extracted from various accounts a few years back, and the amount of effort they spent on the case is far less than a 20th of this one.
Best bet, they haven't spent any significant resources on this case in decades. With no credible leads, what would any assigned staff be investigating?
Declaring the case closed is an administrative issue, nothing more.
If this case was still active, the staff would probably be involved in monitoring the banking system for the serial numbers of the bills given to the hijacker, as well as going over any seizures that included hard currency (for example: drug busts and civil forfeitures across the country; not a small task).
Theoretically, the job could be done by a single python script with a direct line to some central currency database fed by all banks and local law enforcement but with government, everything is more complicated.
"It turns out DB Cooper was a shapeshifting alien hybrid, and that most of the incident was a false memory construct implanted by the Men In Black to hide the fact that he didn't escape using a parachute, but a teleporter."
Keep in mind that the $200,000 is equal to over $1,000,000 of today's money. Also, as someone else pointed out, there's also the hijacking endangering the passengers which probably more serious than taking the money.
He's dead, and he died in or shortly after the jump. Other than the money that the kid found near the Columbia River, none of the bills given to him as ransom have ever been found in circulation, anywhere. Whatever fortune he received from the FBI was not beneficially used by him, or anyone else he could have paid with it.
I'm with you 99.999% of the way. When no remains or money are found, that's the logical conclusion. It's a parlor game at best to conjure up some scenario where he gets out, minus the money -- and stays incognito ever after.
Survival theories end up getting very contrived in both cases. The rational side of me votes "Dead," but I can still be lured into reading an occasional speculative piece that tries to go somewhere with the last sliver of doubt.
In Cooper's case, the potential landing area was so vast & rugged that I'm guessing even the stubborn souls at the FBI couldn't pull off anything resembling an effective, quadrant-by-quadrant search for remains.
Would bones left out in the open still be identifiable? Or are they most likely dust by now?
Regarding Alcatraz, the Mythbusters have shown it to be possible to do what they supposedly did (paddle to shore). How they would've managed to survive with no money leads me to agree that they probably died.
>none of the bills given to him as ransom have ever been found in circulation, anywhere
How extensive really is surveillance of bill serial numbers? I mean, sure, he couldn't show up to close on a house with suitcases fully of those bills, but if it's not every routine deposit at every bank, seems possible that he could have spent it slowly.
I don't know how often serial numbers are checked, but I imagine that if those bills had been in circulation, they would have been retired by now (banks will take damaged/worn-out bills out of circulation to be replaced). I'm sure that the serial numbers are recorded when bills are taken out of circulation, so if the DB Cooper money was circulating, the FBI would have heard about it.
Considering that every letter sent through the post office is scanned, interpreted by computer and stored, it's not unreasonable to assume that serial numbers are at least scanned when they return to the Federal Reserve.
Beyond the police angle, metrics on how quickly money is circulating is probably useful data for Fed economists.
You can not state that as fact. You do not know that. Nobody knows what this person's fate was. That was a theory that was bandied about by the FBI. And it was convenient theory for them given that they could not solve the crime.
For the ones who's unfamiliar with this case, there is a very detailed wikipedia page with close to 200 references for this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper
Anyone else not terribly convinced about the FBI's insistence that Dan Cooper didn't survive the jump when all the copycats who also parachuted, in similar areas (Utah, Nevada, etc.) all survived? In fact, one of the copycats is pretty much the exact same jump aside from the location (Utah instead of Washington), same 727 aircraft and everything.
Was just about to come on here and post this. I've got 5 jumps out of the Perris jet (while it was still flying).
Interestingly, all the DB Cooper stuff was one reason Perris shut it down. It cost them an inordinate amount of money to get through the red tape to be able to allow sport skydiving out of it (courtesy of the 'Cooper Lock' modifications), that once the engines came due for maintenance, they opted not to throw more money down the drain. It was a sad, sad day for the skydiving world.
Yeah, not at all convinced. As I mentioned in another comment, where was the corresponding missing persons report a few days later? Surely someone as "professional" as DB Cooper, who the FBI even insisted picked the day prior to a four day weekend so he would have time to return to work, would have at least one relative or colleague that would notice when he went missing.
KOMO seems to have misinterpreted the press release: the FBI is not closing the case, they're discontinuing active investigation. The case remains open, and new physical evidence is still accepted.
I think about the DB Cooper hijacking every time I fly on a B717 (not the same aircraft model obviously, but has the same centrally-mounted rear emergency exit).
But fascinating to read the Wikipedia entry and realize that DB Cooper, and the no less than 15 copycat "parachute hijackings" he inspired in the same year, created a watershed moment in Airport Security that accelerated our steady march to today's over bearing TSA:
"In all, 15 hijackings similar to Cooper's—all unsuccessful—were attempted in 1972.[130] With the advent of universal luggage searches in 1973 (see Airport security) the general incidence of hijackings dropped precipitously.[131]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._B._Cooper