According to the latest news blurbs, one of which is here, a parachute has been dug up which the FBI says “may” belong to D.B. Cooper, the skyjacker who hijacked a plane back in 1971.
According to the picture in the linked article, the parachute looks to be in pristine condition, right down to numbers stamped on it. Now, I don’t pretend to know anything much about parachutes at all (except that I would NEVER put one on and jump out of an airplane :o ). As such, I have no idea what a parachute is made out of. IE: What kind of cloth or material. I can only assume that it would be a fairly light weight material.
So my question is, wouldn’t it be showing some sort of decomposition after being buried for almost 40 years?
The other thing I read was that part of it was still stuck in the ground and would need to be dug out. Think maybe DB himself is attached to the end stuck in the ground?
Older parachutes were made of silk, then they were mostly made of ripstop nylon until kevlar and Dacron came around. I would assume nylon was mostly used in his day, but thats just an assumption.
The chute was discovered near Amboy, Washington, along a path the FBI is saying that Dan Cooper may have dropped. FYI, some of the cash was discovered along a Columbia River riverbank in Vancouver, Washington in 1980.
However, Amboy is not in the same watershed as Vancouver. If it can be proved the chute actually came from the 1971 hijacking, practically all the theories would have to be tossed.
BTW, none of the $200,000 has ever turned up anywhere, except for the $6k that washed up in 1980.
Unless something has really changed in the last few years they are still made of nylon - F111 ripstop was used up through the early 1990s and then “0-P” (zero porosity) fabrics hit the market; 0-P is F111 nylon with a urethane coating (which results in a fabric that is both zero porosity and very UV resistant). I know that Kevlar suspension lines were available for a while, and Spectra is really popular (both are thinner than the older 550 nylon cord, thick suspension lines were a significant source of drag). I don’t think that anyone ever built an actual canopy out of Kevlar or Dacron.
While nylon degrades in direct sunlight it’d probably last for a long time if it was buried. I’ve seen plenty of old round reserve canopies that have lasted for decades.
I think he was ruled out eventually due to a DNA mismatch - FBI was able to pull some DNA off the tie/tie clip Cooper left behind in 2007 or something, but it didn’t match this guy.
I wonder that as well. I would also think the authorities wouldn’t want to admit someone got away with something like that unless they really had to- its better for them to say he had to have died immediately.