For that matter has an American ever hijacked an airplane? Has a white person (of any nationality) ever hijacked an airplane? Don’t bother posting if you just want to say that this offends you, it’s a legitimate question and I do not mean it as racist and I’m not trying to start trouble.
Offhand, D. B. Cooper comes to mind.
Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. was another “para-jacker”, like Cooper. He was from Utah and went to BYU, so (making a broad generalization) he was probably white.
Regardless, hijackings used to be much more common in the U.S. For instance, from this article:
That’s just amazing that there were 31 hijackings in one year in the US. For comparison, there were zero real hijackings in the US between 1996 and 2000 (all the stats I could find).
Also, another paper which includes a fascinating history of aircraft hijackings. To the OP, regarding U.S. hijackings between 1968-1972:
in the UK Miloslav Hrabinec a Czechoslovakian national committed Australia’s first hijacking at Alice Springs airport in 1972.
oops, the first link “in the UK” is a residual link from a previous post. Preview son, preview.
In some of the articles from Terminus Est’s site there’s mention of a guy from Montana who had tried to hijack a plane with a gun a few weeks before and failed because he was overcome by the crew. Cooper refined the approach by using a bomb.
And a parachute.
In the late 70s there were several attempts by white American women to hijack airplanes or helicopters to break their boyfriends out of the federal prison in Marion, IL. One of the most notable ones ended up with the helicopter pilot wrestling the woman while in flight and her being killed when her gun went off.
And it actually wasn’t D.B. Cooper. D.B. was found on the other side of Oregon and dismissed as a suspect while the hijacking was still ongoing.
The person they were trying to identify was listed as D. Cooper on the manifest but an overzealous reporter wrote that it was D.B. and the monnikor stuck.
Samuel Joseph Byck attempted to hijack a plan and crash it into the White House in 1974. He was caught and killed before the plane took off, but…
Yup. American hijackers are either out and out loonies or greedy. Not sure whether this is an improvement over “other” “motivations” or not.
No, the person was listed on the manifest as Dan Cooper.
Interesting article. But it doesn’t address how several thousand of the $200,000 the hijacker received ended up being found rotting on a river bank, years later.
NPR did a piece on that guy, and while I forget the details, at some point, near the end of his life, he and his wife were in the woods and he was furiously looking for a bucket of money that he’d buried and lost. That could be the source of the money you mention.