Db Cooper Significance

The Disappearance of D.B. Cooper

On November 24th,1971 D.B. Cooper jumped out of a plane with $200,000 dollars; this remains as the only unsolved American hijacking. The FBI have been investigating the D.B. Cooper case for almost 47 years. They have investigated almost 1,000 suspects in this case and none of them have turned out to be him. The disappearance of D.B. Cooper has been a mystery and almost everyone wants to solve it. The mystery behind D.B. Cooper can be summed up in 2 theories: he died and he lived. On November 24th, 1971 a man named Dan Cooper boarded a plane from Portland to Seattle. The media called him D.B. Cooper by mistake and the name stayed with the case. When the man found his seat he ordered a bourbon and soda.

Cooper did not survive the jump from the plane. Cooper had jumped into a storm in the Washington wilderness. Cooper jumped with 2 parachutes and 1 of them was “a non-working training parachute that had been supplied by mistake. If he relied on that chute, he undoubtedly fell to his death”(D.B. Cooper). The 2 parachutes that he left on the plane were the 2 best ones that were supplied. The plane was going 196 miles per hour when he jumped and “when he hit the air at that speed, Cooper probably tumbled head-over-heels”(D.B. Cooper). Where Cooper supposedly jumped was a forest and would have been terrible to land in especially if Cooper was an inexperienced jumper like many believe. Where it would be difficult to land, “ Even if he’d just sprained his leg it’d be a death sentence in that in that kind of environment”(D.B. Cooper). The hunt for his body came up empty handed. The reason for that would be “If cooper died in the forests of Washington, there would be little evidence of his demise. Small animals would have eaten his flesh and scattered his bones so that investigators would have a hard time identifying his remains.”(D.B. Cooper). Many people believe he died because the serial numbers of the number was never spent. The only problem with this is that the FBI found no trace of him and found only part of the

Over the years there has been a lot of leads and suspects. Richard Floyd McCoy Jr. was a lead suspect. In 1972 he “was accused of hijacking a united airlines 727 jet flying from Newark to Los Angeles after it made a scheduled stop in denver”(Katz 263). The similarities of the 2 hijackings are almost identical. The FBI ruled him out as a suspect “Because he didn’t match the almost identical physical descriptions that flight attendants gave of cooper”(Katz 264). Another suspect was Duane Weber. He told his wife Jo that he was Dan Cooper on his deathbed. There was some similarities between him and cooper and some were “He had black hair, drank bourbon, and chain-smoked”(Katz 266).Weber also told Jo that he hurt his knee jumping out of a plane. Jo told the FBI that “ Weber was sleep talking in may 1978 when he said that he left fingerprints on the aft stairs. Then woke up in a sweat. Jo Weber was doing their taxes and came across an old airplane ticket saying SEA-TAC and Northwest Airlines. On his deathbed “as he lay dying in the hospital in March 1995, weber said that he forgot where he buried $173,000 in a bucket”(Katz 266). These are the 2 major suspects that the FBI ruled out. They have investigated more than 800 suspects and still have not been able to find the