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D.B. Cooper: The Only Unsolved Hijacking in American Aviation
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
On November 24, 1971, a man called D.B. Cooper hijacked a commercial flight, collected $200,000 in ransom, and parachuted into the Pacific Northwest — never to be found. Fifty years on, it remains the only unsolved hijacking in American aviation history.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Nobody has ever been charged. Nobody has ever been arrested.
Let's start with what happened on that flight, because the details matter. The man later known to the public as D.B.
The FBI launched one of the most extensive manhunts in the Bureau's history. They called it NORJAK, short for Northwest Hijacking.
In February of nineteen eighty, almost nine years after the hijacking, a boy named Brian Ingram was digging along the banks of the Columbia River near Vancouver, Washington. He found a small bundle of deteriorating currency.
Over the decades, investigators focused seriously on several individuals. One name that attracted significant FBI attention was Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., a former Green Beret and Sunday school teacher who, just months after the Cooper hijacking in April nineteen seventy-two, conducted a near-identical aircraft hijacking.
This case sits at the center of a tension that runs through many of the oldest unsolved American crimes. The gap between what was preserved and what could be learned from it.
There's a reason the D.B. Cooper story has persisted in the American imagination for over half a century.
Here's where things stand. The identity of D.B.
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