Dan Cooper
Ticket name of the hijacker
The only name on the Portland ticket. Description: dark suit, quiet manner, mid-forties. Never identified. D.B. Cooper is a reporter’s mix-up that the wires kept.
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
Notoriety90
Mystery96
Scale42
Evidence38
Legal impact74
Culture88
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Quick answers
Who was D.B. Cooper?
An unidentified man who used the ticket name Dan Cooper on Northwest Orient Flight 305 on 24 November 1971. D.B. Cooper is a press error that stuck. No one was convicted. The FBI suspended the case in 2016.
What did he demand and receive?
He demanded $200,000 and four parachutes. Northwest Orient delivered that sum in $20 bills whose serial numbers were recorded, plus the chutes, at Seattle-Tacoma before the passengers were released.
Where did he leave the aircraft?
After the Seattle departure, over southwestern Washington, using the Boeing 727’s aft airstairs. The FBI’s first search box centred near Ariel; later wind models widened the corridor. No confirmed landing site was found.
Was any of the ransom found?
Yes. On 10 February 1980 Brian Ingram found about $5,800 in deteriorating $20 bills on Tena Bar, a Columbia River beach near Vancouver, Washington. The FBI matched serial numbers to the ransom list. The rest of the money remains unaccounted for.
Did the FBI identify a suspect?
The Bureau investigated thousands of names and publicly discussed several persons of interest. None was charged as Cooper. Richard McCoy, a 1972 hijacker, was a recurring comparison and was not adopted as the Flight 305 jumper.
Why is the case still unsolved?
No body, unused chute or unused ransom cache was authenticated. Witnesses aged. The 1980 river find did not lead to a person. In 2016 the FBI said active investigation was no longer justified.
The living file is a flight crew, FBI agents and a child who found money in river sand.
Amateur suspect names are omitted here unless they entered dated official comparison.
People
Tina Mucklow
Flight attendant, Flight 305
Stayed on board after Seattle and sat with Cooper during the night flight. Her later interviews are primary witness memory, not a solution.
Florence Schaffner
Flight attendant, Flight 305
Received the first note after takeoff from Portland. She and Mucklow are the two cabin witnesses most often cited in the FBI file.
William Scott
Captain, Flight 305
Flew the Seattle hold, the southbound segment and the Reno landing. Crew instrument notes later helped bound the jump window.
Ralph Himmelsbach
FBI special agent, NORJAK
The case’s best-known Bureau voice. His later book argued the jumper likely died; that is memoir, not a recovered body.
Brian Ingram
Tena Bar finder, 1980
As a boy he uncovered three packets of ransom $20s on the Columbia. The FBI authenticated the serials. The find did not name the hijacker.
Crew and agents left paper. The jumper left a nickname and a river exhibit.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.