He Hijacked a Plane for $200,000, Jumped Into a Storm, and Was Never Seen Again. D.B. Cooper.

On November 24, 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a man walked up to the Northwest Orient counter at Portland International Airport and paid cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle.

He gave his name as Dan Cooper.

He wore a dark suit, a white shirt and a black clip-on tie. He carried a briefcase. He ordered a bourbon and soda and lit a cigarette.

A few minutes after takeoff, he handed a flight attendant a note.

Five hours later he was gone, out the back of the plane, into the dark, with $200,000. He has never been found.

The note

The flight was Northwest Orient Flight 305, a Boeing 727, carrying 36 passengers and six crew. It left Portland at about 2:50 in the afternoon for a short hop to Seattle.

The man sat in seat 18-E, near the back. He passed a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner. She assumed he was flirting and put it in her pocket.

He leaned over and told her she had better read it. It said he had a bomb.

She sat down beside him. He opened his briefcase just enough for her to see red cylinders, wires and a battery.

Then he gave her his demands: $200,000 in cash, four parachutes, and a fuel truck waiting in Seattle.

Seattle

The plane circled Seattle for about two hours while the FBI and the airline gathered the money and the parachutes. The passengers were told there was a mechanical problem.

The airline's president agreed to pay. The FBI photographed the 10,000 twenty-dollar bills before handing them over, recording their serial numbers.

At about 5:46 p.m., the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma. The money and the parachutes were brought aboard. Cooper released all 36 passengers and two of the flight attendants.

He kept the three pilots and flight attendant Tina Mucklow on board.

Witnesses later said he seemed calm and polite. He knew things about the 727 that surprised the crew, including that its rear stairway could be lowered in flight.

The jump

At about 7:40 p.m., the plane took off again, headed for Mexico City with a planned refueling stop in Reno.

Cooper gave precise instructions: fly at the lowest safe speed, below 10,000 feet, with the landing gear down and the wing flaps lowered. He wanted the rear stairs down.

He sent Tina Mucklow to the cockpit. She was the last person to see him.

At about 8:00 p.m., a warning light showed the rear stairway had been lowered.

At about 8:13 p.m., the crew felt the tail of the plane lift sharply, and the cabin pressure changed.

When the plane landed in Reno at 11:02 p.m., the stairs were still down. The cabin was empty. Cooper, the money and two of the four parachutes were gone.

The search

The FBI calculated where he might have jumped, over the forests of southwest Washington, near the Lewis River, in a cold rainstorm, at night, wearing a business suit and loafers.

Hundreds of soldiers, agents and volunteers searched the woods for weeks. They found nothing.

Over the years, the estimated landing zone shifted as investigators rechecked the flight path.

In 1978, a hunter found a placard from the rear stairway of a 727, with instructions on how to lower the stairs, near a logging road north of Lake Merwin. It was the first physical trace of the hijacking found outside the plane.

The money on the riverbank

On February 10, 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram was digging in the sand at Tena Bar on the Columbia River, west of Vancouver, Washington, to build a campfire.

He uncovered three bundles of twenty-dollar bills, rotted and stuck together, still in their rubber bands. About $5,800.

The serial numbers matched the ransom.

It is the only ransom money ever found. How it got there has never been explained. Later analysis of the riverbank suggested the money arrived years after the hijacking, possibly washed in by the river, but nobody knows for sure.

The rest of the money, about $194,000, has never turned up.

What he left behind

Cooper left a few things on the plane.

His black clip-on tie, with a gold tie clip, was on his seat. The tie was a brand sold at JCPenney.

He left eight cigarette butts in the armrest ashtray. They were later lost or destroyed while in FBI custody, before they could be tested for DNA.

Agents lifted dozens of fingerprints from the cabin. None led to an identification.

He also left two parachutes. One was a reserve that had been opened and had some of its cords cut, possibly to tie up the money bag. The other was a main parachute he did not use.

In the 2010s, a team of independent scientists studied particles on the tie. They found tiny particles of pure titanium and other metals, which suggested he may have worked around aerospace or chemical manufacturing. It was an interesting lead, but it pointed to a kind of workplace, not a person.

The case is closed, sort of

The FBI investigated more than 800 suspects over 45 years.

Some people confessed. Some families came forward to say a relative had been Cooper. None has been proved.

On July 8, 2016, the FBI announced it was ending its active investigation. It said it would still look at physical evidence, such as the parachutes or the money, if any surfaced.

In 2024, the FBI collected a parachute rig found in a North Carolina outbuilding by an independent investigator. After nearly two years of testing, the FBI quietly returned it in December 2025 without saying what, if anything, it had found.

Because no one has ever been charged with the hijacking, no suspect is named on this page.

What we still don't know

Did he survive the jump? The FBI long believed he probably did not. He jumped at night, in the rain, into forest, in loafers and a suit.

If he died, why has no one ever found his body, his parachute or the money bag?

How did $5,800 end up buried in the sand of the Columbia River, miles from where he probably landed?

And who was he? A quiet man in a dark suit who knew exactly how a 727 worked, and then vanished into the rain.