In all the articles I’ve read on Cooper, they agree that he was wearing loafers. I can’t see these staying on during a jump. Landing without any ankle support and then having to hike through the wilderness in his stocking feet would’ve really cut his survival chances. I think it’s likely he broke an ankle in the jump and eventually died of exposure.
Still, an incredibly fascinating story with so many twists and turns and developments that I never tire of reading updates on the investigation.
OK. Tell us who he was. Apparently you know he was not an experienced diver. Some guy took his first jump in the dark out of an airplane that nobody else ever lept out of?
The FBI concluded that Cooper wasn’t an experienced jumper, based on him not recognizing the “dummy” reserve chute, as Marley stated (Cite).
Cooper could have made a few jumps years before, either military or sport, just enough to convince himself he could pull it off. A very experienced skydiver would know enough to never attempt a jump in those conditions, another fact that helped convince the FBI that Cooper wasn’t an experienced jumper.
I don’t consider a skydiver to be “experienced” until they have 100 jumps or more. I’m an experienced skydiver, as I stated in post #6 of the other DB Cooper thread.
Did they do the jump over mountainous tree-covered terrain, where the jumper couldn’t see the ground and had no idea where he was going to land? Those factors are a big part of what made Cooper’s jump so dangerous.
[QUOTE=ElvisL1ves;14098195and the stuff he was carrying went flying at however many thousand feet that was, it could have gone anywhere. If you think he stayed conscious and held on all the way down,[/QUOTE]
As I recall, he was not “carrying” the bag of money, but had tied it onto himself with cords.
If the plane’s location at jump was known within 90 seconds’ flying distance, that puts Cooper’s location inside a circle with a radius of probably 5 miles or so. In mountainous terrain, that’s actually a pretty big search area. Plus, if he opened his chute early at 10,000 feet, he could have drifted a long distance if there was significant wind - and at that altitude there would be.
If Cooper hit rocks on landing or landed high in a tree, or in some other way killed himself on impact, I can believe that the body would not be found if it landed in a secluded place. The parachute is more iffy. If he was killed at impact, the chute would most likely have been highly visible.
I like the notion that he accidentally dropped the money on the way down, then landed successfully and buried the chute and went looking for the money - and wound up dying of hypothermia or a fall, and he’s still out there. Or maybe he landed with the money and knew he had to hide it if he hoped to walk out past the gauntlet, and then died on the way out after hiding the money.
But if this new guy is DB, that’s a pretty sad story. After going through all that prep, and successfully pulling off one of the most daring heists in history, you lose the money in the woods and drag your sorry, beaten ass home, broke. And you can’t even talk about it! You’d be constantly reading articles speculating about you, and you couldn’t say a thing. It would be a strange life.
One more thing puzzles me…why would a hijacker give his real name, even his real last name, when buying a ticket? In those days, he could have given any name at all and made it harder to get caught.
Re-reading Band of Brothers, and one of the things mentioned near the beginning of the book was the Airborne troops’ using separate bags to carry their rifles, ammunition and other heavy equipment. Those bags were attached to the trooper by a line and a clip. The theory went, you jump out of the airplane with the bag clipped to you, and before you hit the ground, you unclip the bag and let it drop, still attached to you by the line, though. That way, it hits the ground first, and you don’t have to absorb its weight when you land. Unfortunately, they didn’t test this theory beforehand, and when they bailed out over Normandy, their bags were often ripped from them by the slipstream: clip, line, and all. It is tough to fight without your weapon… I am wondering whether a similar thing happened with Cooper’s bag of cash. Since it’s unlikely he was an expert parachutist, I’m not confident he could’ve lashed the bag to him sufficiently to keep it with him.
On the pilot’s not knowing where the plane was when Cooper jumped, since the pilots were on a Victor Airway, that means they were using a VORTAC for navigation. They also had DME. It should have been trivial for them to note when he jumped, and looked at the VORTAC needles to see if they were centered and what the DME was telling them. Pilots generally have a very good idea of where they are at all times, even at night. And the shudder they felt, along with the pressure change, gives them a real good hard time of when Cooper jumped.
Since no chute was found, I’m thinking he either never pulled it, and splatted somewhere much further south than the Lewis River, to account for the money discovered at the Tena Bar, or it went down like Sam Stone wrote in his second or third paragraph I quoted. It’s easy to imagine that he never pulled it. I understand a problem with novice skydivers is that they get so overwhelmed by the sensations that they forget to pull the ripcord, or indeed, even remember where the ripcord is. Add an uncontrolled tumble to the mix—easy to do at night—and a screw up with estimating his height over ground, and I can totally see him not being able to get the chute out.
A problem with the splatting idea is that the terrain in the south, around Battle Ground or Orchard, WA, isn’t that mountainous unless you go quite a bit east of the plane’s track. It looks rather flat and cleared, actually. I don’t think the winds were blowing out of the west heavily, either, so I don’t think he’d have been blown into, say, Elkhorn Mountain. So if he splatted, it’s likely he’d have been found. Not certain, but surprising if he wasn’t. Of course, if he buried the chute, then went stumble-butting around barefoot, with a probable rolled ankle or two, then it’s easily conceivable for his body not to be found. Especially if he hunkers down somewhere in the middle of his search, to get out of the cold—hollow of a tree, small arroyo, a thicket, that sort of thing—and succumbs to hypothermia.
I read your final paragraph, Sam, and I’m laughing at the cosmic joke of it. Wouldn’t it be funny if that’s how it went down?
This is what bothers me too. Granted, Cooper is a common enough name. But I can’t see him giving his real name when buying the ticket AND on the note saying he had a bomb. If he was that stupid, he didn’t deserve to pull this off.
I had the same thought. Depending on the parachute, the weight of the skydiver, and the velocity at opening, the shock imparted to diver and gear can range from 3 to 12 G’s. At 10 g’s, that bag weighed over 200 lbs. I could easily imagine him lashing that bag to himself by tying it to his belt or something, and having the whole arrangement snap at chute opening.
Do we know the plane was on a Victor Airway? Did DB have them veer off to an area of his choosing? Was the direction he told them to fly even on an airway?
In any event, I thought the 90 second range was because they didn’t know the exact instant he left the plane. Was he in view of any of the plane’s personnel when he jumped? If so, did the flight crew take the time to button up the door before informing the pilots he had jumped? I thought the 90 seconds was the sum of the various errors in determining exactly when he left the plane.
As for the VOR and DME, it would be understandable if the pilots didn’t have the needle exactly centered, given all the distractions they faced - especially around the time of the jump. There’s also some built-in inaccuracy to that equipment at large distances from a beacon.
No, that gave them a good idea of when the door was opened. It could have gone down like this:
T-0: Pilots feel a shudder, and know the door has been opened.
T+60s: Pilot says to first officer, “Okay, it’s been a minute. Go see if he’s gone, and close the door.”
Co-Pilot unstraps and makes his way back to the door. Cooper’s gone, so he closes the door then heads back to the cockpit and says, “Yep, he’s gone.” So there’s a window of 90 seconds from the time that he opened the door to the time they verified that he left the plane, and he could have actually jumped out at any point in that window.
Entirely possible. Especially if it was a moonless night and he can’t see the ground. On the other hand, I can easily imagine that an inexperienced jumper would pull the ripcord way too early - he jumped from 10,000 feet, which is a long free-fall. How far could he have drifted if he pulled the chute at 9,000 feet?
Also, what if he panicked and pulled the chute very early, while he was still in the plane’s wake turbulence? Would that shred the chute? Wake turbulence has been known to flip aircraft upside down - a parachute going through a large jet’s wake would be like a feather in a tornado. That could also be how he lost the bag.
At 10,000 feet, the wind is almost always blowing. If he pulled his chute early, he could have drifted a long way unless the conditions were unusually calm. Does the literature say what the winds aloft were at the time of his jump?
I don’t know. If he hit a heavily forested area at 120 mph, he could have punched through the trees and landed in thick underbrush. You wouldn’t find him then unless you walked right into his body. There could be next to no trace of him at all except for an impact spot hidden in brush. The trees would also obscure searches from the air.
That still sounds like the likeliest outcome. If he had nothing but a suit and had to walk miles out of dense forested terrain at night, hypothermia could easily have gotten him, and he would also have probably tried to seek shelter not just from the elements but from a search. If he intentionally hid himself from discovery while he rested/slept/died, his body may never be found.
An experienced diver ,who was extorting the airlines out of 200, 000 bucks ,might have a different decision. I suppose nobody would do the jump for sport, but this was not sport. He had to go remote enough to be able to get away.
I doubt an inexperience diver would come up with a daring plan like that. How would he even know he had the nerve to jump out of an airplane ? How would he know how to jump at all. Your first jumps, you are tutored like a child.
I don’t buy it. I think he knew how to jump.
I’m just extrapolating here…but Cooper sure is a common name in the USA. If an 8 yo child heard her uncle talking about something she didn’t understand; he said he going hunting and later came back bruised; and 40 years later she connected her own family name with the hijacker’s, and convinced herself that her uncle’s odd behavior matched a theoretical one…well, it’s confabulation city. 40 years later, is she really sure of the exact dates down to the exact day? It could have been months or years apart.
Personally, I hope she is right and it will be proven by fingerprints, DNA, etc. I’d like to see closure to an enduring mystery.
Again, we don’t know that he was experienced, and I think the evidence says he wasn’t.
I guess you don’t watch enough action movies. On the face of it the plan sounds very simple: you demand the money, tell the airplane to take off, and jump out. Doesn’t that sound like it should work? And he probably had some knowledge of that type of airplane. It’s not until you get into the details (like what Sam Stone said about the turbulence, which never would have occurred to me) that it starts to sound like a complicated task that would be very hard to do correctly, and that it would be even harder under the conditions he was in.
He might have even had some jump experience. He could have been in the military and done a few drops. Having jumped from a plane does not make one instantly experienced, however.
We will probably never know unless someone stumbles on more evidence of something conclusively related to the event.
If he opened the chute that early, even if the chute withstood the forces, it would do quite a number on Cooper himself.
My only skydiving experience was when the chute opened at the usual 120 mph or so, and the shock of the opening broke my C2 vertebra in my neck. I know that’s unusual, but the shock of an opening at, what, 200 mph?, would be really violent.
On the face of it the plan sounds very simple: you demand the money, tell the airplane to take off, and jump out. Doesn’t that sound like it should work? And he probably had some knowledge of that type of airplane. It’s not until you get into the details (like what Sam Stone said about the turbulence, which never would have occurred to me) that it starts to sound like a complicated task that would be very hard to do correctly, and that it would be even harder under the conditions he was in.