The other day, Paul Tocknell from Ask a CFI.com made a throw-away comment on Twitter:

Just learned about the D.B. Cooper story. Crazy.

As I am easily distracted, I wandered off to find out who D.B. Cooper was and spent the rest of the day reading about the only unsolved hijacking case in the US.

Paul is right, the story is crazy and fascinating. In an attempt to justify the amount of time I spent reading about the the man and his disappearance, I’ve compiled this set of links on the web to share with you.

The Full Story

D.B. Cooper, the legendary skyjacker – extortionist – Crime Library on truTV.com

Cooper handed a note to Flo Schaffner moments after the jet was airborne. Men traveling alone often passed phone or hotel room numbers to the attractive young stewardess. She assumed another come-on and gave the note her usual treatment, sticking it unread in a uniform pocket.

The next time Schaffner passed, Cooper gestured for her to lean close. He said, “You’d better read that. I have a bomb.” He nodded toward the briefcase in his lap. Schaffner went to the galley, read the note, then shared it with fellow attendant Tina Mucklow. They hurried to the cockpit, where Capt. Scott had a look. The pilot immediately radioed Sea-Tac air traffic control, who alerted Seattle police, who in turn alerted the FBI. The feds placed an urgent call to Northwest Orient’s president, Donald Nyrop, who ordered full compliance with Cooper’s demands. Nyrop no doubt hoped to avoid the negative publicity that a disaster aboard a Northwest flight would bring. By comparison, $200,000 was a pittance.

Sluggo’s Northwest 305 Hijacking Research Site

When the flight landed in Seattle, the hijacker exchanged the flight’s 36 passengers for the money and parachutes. Cooper kept several crewmembers, and the plane took off again, ordered to set a course for Mexico City.

Somewhere between Seattle and Reno, sometime around 8:13 p.m., the hijacker did the incredible: he jumped out of the back of the plane with a parachute and the ransom money. The pilots landed safely, but Cooper had disappeared into the night and his ultimate fate remains a mystery to this day.

D. B. Cooper – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Despite aerial and ground searches of the projected 28-square-mile (73 km2) landing zone in late 1971 and spring 1972, no trace of Cooper or his parachute was found. An exact landing point was difficult to determine, as the plane’s 300 feet (91 m)-per-second speed in winds varying by location and altitude would make even small differences in timing move the projected landing point considerably. This led the FBI to determine that Cooper could not have known exactly where he would land, and therefore must not have had an accomplice waiting to assist him upon landing.

FBI Files

The FBI have released a set of 7 PDF files with the full details of the initial case:

Federal Bureau of Investigation – Freedom of Information Privacy Act

On November 24, 1971, an unknown subject, also known as Dan Cooper, purchased a one-way ticket on Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305. The flight was carrying 36 passengers and crew. The flight originated in Portland, Oregon with the final destination of Seattle, Washington. The plane was hijacked just prior to its arrival in Seattle. In Seattle, the hijacker allowed the passengers and two stewardesses to depart the plane. Northwest Orient Airlines paid the hijacker $200,000. The plane departed Seattle for Reno, Nevada. It is believed the hijacker parachuted from the plane during this flight. Authorities and personnel from Fort Lewis, Washington searched for Mr. Cooper but he was never found. In 1980, an 8-year-old boy found $5,800 on the bank of the Columbia River. This is the only money ever recovered from the ransom.

Popular Literature

There have been a number of books written about the man – from both FBI agents and amateur sleuths:

• Amazon.co.uk listing
• Amazon.com listing

Could D.B. Cooper still be identified?

D.B. Cooper, where are you?

Forman said a friend of his — who was a loner, like the FBI described — confessed to Forman and his wife. The friend, who looked similar to the FBI sketch, was a proficient skydiver, an expert with dynamite and mysteriously disappeared in the days around the hijacking.

The kicker: Forman’s friend was a woman named Barbara Dayton; family and friends say she is believed to be the first person in Washington to have a sex-change operation.

Check Your $20 bills

D B Cooper’s Loot Serial Number Searcher

All of the ten-thousand $20 bills were photographed with a high-speed Recordak machine to create a microfilm later to be used to prepare a list of serial numbers.

Our engine will take the information you supply, and comb our database of the nearly 10,000 serial number of the hijacker’s ill-gotten gains. If you got a bill with one of the serial numbers, the program will tell you.

FOXNews.com – D.B. Cooper Skyjacking Cash Sold in Dallas Auction

Fifteen tattered $20 bills recovered from the 1971 D.B. Cooper skyjacking sold Friday for more than 120 times their face value at a Dallas auction.

Heritage Auction Galleries said the bills sold for a total of more than $37,000 — two to three times higher than expected.

Winning bidders paid about $6,500 each for two of the $20 bills. The money has the handwritten initials of investigators who examined the bills, which were found buried in sand in 1980.

Recent Copy Cat?

Pilot Jumps From Malibu, Flees Authorities

Authorities in Alabama are looking for the pilot of a Piper Malibu that crashed in Florida after the pilot apparently made a fake distress call, put the aircraft on autopilot and parachuted out late Sunday. The plane went on to crash near East Milton on the Florida panhandle while the pilot, identified as Marcus Schrenker, 38, an investment broker from Indianapolis, was being taken to a hotel in Harpersville, Ala., by a local police officer. According to the Childersburg Police Department, Schrenker told an officer he’d been in a canoeing accident and he was escorted to the hotel. Some time later, when police there heard about the crash and recognized Schrenker’s name, they went back to the hotel but Schrenker was gone. A hotel employee told them he put on a black cap and disappeared into the woods. The unusual string of events began with Schrenker taking off from Anderson Municipal Airport in Indiana Sunday evening.

The plane crashed at about 9:15 p.m. Sometime earlier, about 220 miles to the north near Birmingham, Ala., Schrenker made a distress call, saying the windshield on the aircraft had imploded and he was severely cut. At some point after that he “appears to have intentionally abandoned the plane after putting it on autopilot over the Birmingham, Alabama, area and parachuting to the ground,” according to a news release from the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office in Milton, Fla. The cop who took Schrenker to the hotel in Harpersville said the pilot was wet from the knees down but didn’t appear hurt.

The Search Continues

FBI — D.B. Cooper – Press Room – New Developments in the Unsolved Case 03-17-09

Larry Carr thinks it’s highly unlikely that Cooper survived the jump. “But he came from somewhere and from someone. And that is what we want to know.” Based on what he has learned so far, here is Carr’s profile of Cooper:

• He served in the Air Force and at some point was stationed in Europe, where he may have become interested in the Dan Cooper comic books.
• He worked as a cargo loader on planes, giving him knowledge and experience in the aviation industry, which was in its infancy in 1971.
• Because his job required him to throw cargo out of planes, Cooper would have worn an emergency parachute in case he fell out. This would have provided him with working knowledge of parachutes but not necessarily the functional knowledge to survive the jump he made.
• He may have come from the East Coast, but taken an aviation job in Seattle when he got out of the military. It’s possible he lost his job during an economic downturn in the aviation industry in 1970-71. If he was a loner with little or no family, “nobody would have missed him” after he was gone.

Can You Help?

FBI — D.B. Cooper Redux – Help Us Solve the Enduring Mystery

Who was Cooper? Did he survive the jump? And what happened to the loot, only a small part of which has ever surfaced?

It’s a mystery, frankly. We’ve run down thousands of leads and considered all sorts of scenarios. And amateur sleuths have put forward plenty of their own theories. Yet the case remains unsolved.

Would we still like to get our man? Absolutely. And we have reignited the case—thanks to a Seattle case agent named Larry Carr and new technologies like DNA testing.

When I was a little girl, we used to go on a lot of long car journeys. The adults were not as sympathetic as I felt perhaps they should be and my attempts to make conversation (“Where are we going again?” “Are we almost there yet?”) were largely scorned. I learned to occupy myself by staring out the window and imagining stories the neighbourhoods that we were driving past. I would make up entire histories for the people that we passed and intersect my life with theirs.

“That man walking the dog is named Walter. He is a repair man and last month he came by the house to repair our refrigerator. He told me about his wife, Zelda, who goes to the gym three times a week.”

I’m a grown up now and it shows. Sometimes when Cliff is flying, I stare out of the window of the Saratoga as we fly over some of the most beautiful neighbourhoods that I’ve ever seen. But these days when I look at the houses, I don’t make stories for the occupants.

These days I rewrite my own history and imagine myself living in those wonderful houses – complete with arguments with the neighbours about the damn cement mixer right at my back fence.

As we fly over the Cotswolds, I find the most amazing houses that must be a joy to live in although I wouldn’t like to think about the upkeep of the gardens. Still, if you can afford a house like that, you can afford a gardener, right?

And I do feel that a wide selection of barns and sheds and guest houses would increase my quality of living. I don’t play tennis myself but my good friends inform me that there is no such thing as too many tennis courts.

I probably don’t have the right mindset for living in a mansion like one of these, though I sure would like to give it a try. When I was a kid, we had car engines lying around the back yard. Splintered motorcycles leaned against oak trees, just in case there were any useful parts yet to be harvested. A bright orange VW beetle rusted away in the long grass.

If I got a big house like this, I’d probably end up in the same state:

If by some miracle, anyone actually recognises a house in this series, do let me know and I’ll forward a full-size photograph to the owners as a thank you for some exceedingly nice daydreams.

It took a couple of visits before I felt confident landing at Glenforsa airfield. It’s a grass runway with no margin for error: hills on one side and the Sound of Mull on the other. Having said that, there has never been a serious injury at Glenforsa although the Glenforsa Airfield History includes some incredible photographs including this one:

See the history page on the Glenforsa Airfield Web site for more great photographs and the story of the airfield.

Location: Glenforsa is on the east side of the Isle of Mull, Inner Hebrides, Scotland

Airfield: Glenforsa Airfield (Mull)
Website: Home – Glenforsa Airfield
Phone Number: 01680 300402 / 07799 744908
Email: dsh@glenforsaairfield.co.uk
Hours: PPR Essential 0900-1700
Frequencies: 120.8
Runways: 07/25 (marked as 08/26) grass 780m x 28m
Airfield Height: 15′
Notes: level end to end but slowping down to the sea. Attempt to land on the high (south) side of the runway.
Circuit Height: all circuits to the north at 800ft
Fuel: None
Weather Info: If possible on “Fly-in” days, advisory weather will be placed on the answer-phone attached to 01680 300402 and this will only be updated if there is any significant change to the advised conditions.
Divert: Oban Airport, 18nm SE

See also: Destination: Oban

Joining instructions: If possible, join overhead at 1,500ft. If using R07 then fly a curved approach from base leg, inside the hill.

Google Map View

The notes for the airfield have a wonderful personal touch. I found it reassuring to know that the strip is clear of sheep at weekends. You are also warned that accommodation on the island is limited but you can camp for free beside your aircraft.

I can vouch for the fact that David Howitt, who administers the airfield, is always helpful and willing to go the extra mile to help make visits to Mull a success. On one occassion, when the weather closed in around the island, he got in touch with Scottish Info to pass us a message so that we had plenty of time to choose an appropriate divert. He’s happy to arrange a rental car if you give him plenty of notice, so that you can land at the airfield and immediately make your way to your holiday destination. And when I expressed some reluctance to take the plane off on damp grass heading directly into a hill, he took the time to reassure me as well as offering practical advice as to when to abort and how to minimise the risk in general terms.

Glenforsa Hotel has a webcam pointing at the airfield. A big fat raindrop just landed on it while I was watching but usually you get a clear view of the runway and the windsock.

Flying is hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

When I first started flying, I presumed that the phrase was referring to the take-off and landing. I hadn’t even begun to conceive of things going wrong in the air; flying from A to B was the easy bit. Getting into the air and getting back down, well, that was where I found my heart beginning to race.

Now that I am only flying intermittently, I’m very aware that my skill-set is diminishing when I don’t get up into the air regularly. The first sign that I’m falling out of date is the quality of my landings. A simple flight after weeks of sitting on the ground is much more stressful than it should be. Instead of instinctively knowing what’s next, I have to think hard and I fall behind the plane, desperately trying to keep up with everything that needs doing.

A major change that has helped me in the Saratoga is shifting from the traditional approach. Like most PPLs, I was taught to use attitude to control airspeed and power to control height. However, the inertia of the Saratoga and its tendency to sink like a stone at low speed, combined with my inability to nudge the power gently enough to keep my pitch steady, can make this difficult. A bad approach can feel like a ship in heavy weather as I adjust the power back and forth to try to keep my perspective of the runway correct.

I flew with a commercial pilot last year and he mentioned that this was not the best system for fast planes. When flying a jet, he told me, pilots always used attitude for height and power to control airspeed.

This is referenced in one of my favourite books, Beyond the PPL

In days of yore, instructors always taught that on the approach you should control airspeed with pitch and maintain the correct glideslope with the throttle.

The technique taught was (and still is) a good device for getting students to co-ordinate properly their applications of pitch and throttle.

[...]

So the old-fashioned technique is not appropriate for a jet and its pilots are therefore taught to adjust speed with throttle and glideslope with pitch control. The need to co-ordinate pitch and throttle remains as before, but the cardinal requirement for the jet pilot is to monitor the speed on the approach to a degree which usually amazes piston pilots at first. You simply HAVE to nail that speed and catch any departure before it has a chance to develop into anything the least bit significant.

Once I started looking into methods for final approach, I found a lot of discussion about pitch and power. It seems clear that attitude for speed and power for height makes for one of the most practical demonstrations of secondary effects. It also works: I was very happy using pitch and power that way in the Cessna 172 that I trained in.

But the moment I shifted to using power for speed and pitch for height in the Saratoga, my landings improved. After two days of flying touch-and-go over various airfields, I felt confident in my ability to land this way: point the plane at the numbers and hold it there, use the throttle to adjust the speed. My adjustments remained minor and my approaches became smoother than they’d ever been before. My passengers were amazed at the difference.

However, I don’t think that it not simply a case of turning the controls around. The critical factor is that I began to control the plane using both systems. I finally grasped that it isn’t a question of using pitch or power but that they are completely interlinked. I’m sure this was stated a million times in the PPL but I only understood this as a theoretical concept. I didn’t really have an instinctive feel for the fact that you can’t change one without affecting the other.

I love long finals now simply because I can see how perfectly everything works together. I set up my approach and now I’m holding the pitch steady and watching my touchdown point and my airspeed. I can almost visualise a road leading down to the runway and just a tap on the controls to keep me travelling on it. I know the correct approach speed and holding to it has never felt so easy. My interaction with both the controls affecting both height and speed means that I avoid the abrupt power changes and my approaches no longer make people seasick.

When I completed my PPL, my instructor told me that my flying was perfectly competent but that I lacked finesse. It’s been a few years but I feel like I’m starting to understand what he meant and that just maybe I’m finally getting the hang of this flying thing. Now, if only I could learn to use a soft touch on the rudder and keep that damn ball in the centre, maybe he’d agree.

This week I’ll shut up about myself for once and share a collection of links that have shown up in my inbox.

Vincent (Plastic Pilot) and Jason (MzeroA) have successfully launched their new website: http://www.flyingacrossamerica.com. They are starting in Florida and aiming to make their way west to my home-state and visit Catalina Island – I used to go to Catalina on the ferry for sports matches when I was in highschool. I didn’t even know they had an airfield! I’m very much looking forward to reading the GA adventures that Vincent and Jason enjoy on their travels. You can follow the journey on their website:
Flying Across America

We found our first stop: We’ve been invited by the guys at DestinJet, the premier FBO at Destin, on the Florida panhandle. With their brand new 6,000 sq ft executive terminal and state of the art facilities for passengers and crew, Destin Jet combines the Glory Days of aviation with every latest technology and service. They also accepted to refuel our Cessna 150 for free which is a great help to reduce our costs.

I have to admit that this looks like a lot of fun:
Cluster Ballooning: 100 Helium Balloons Strapped to a Lawn Chair

Sure, it looks like being carried off by a multicoloured raspberry, but would you care about such style points if you were floating coolly on a cloud – and with so little keeping you up there? Prepare for lift-off as we take an aerial tour through this extraordinary and breathtaking form of ballooning.

Rob Mark of Jetwhine reviews Artful Flying by Michael Maya Charles, thoughtfully sorting out my Christmas present for the aviator in my life:
Artful Flying – Jetwhine: Aviation Buzz and Bold Opinion

Artful Flying will bust your chops if you’re simply an airplane driver because it talks to readers about the philosophy of flying the way the old guys – and girls – used to do it. No, the physics of flying hasn’t really changed, but the art of flying has, at least in the sense that flying as an art seems to have a lot of its luster over the past 20 years..

Delayed and cancelled flights are a standard hazard for air travel but some of the recent reasons have been quite bizarre:
Copilot peeing in public cancels JAL flight from Honolulu | Gadling.com

Of all the reasons to have your flight canceled, I’m pretty sure this one is high on the “no frikkin way!” list.

On the other hand, that’s got to be better than kicking all the passengers off the plane and flying alone:
AMS: 737 Pilot Has Pax Removed And Flies Out Empty – Civil Aviation Forum | Airliners.net

For the first time in the history of Schiphol, a pilot had his entire plane evacuated after a dozen passengers behaved badly. The aircraft then left empty, and the passengers were sent home.

And last but not least, two videos from last month which hit the top of my list of “So glad I was not piloting that one”. Note neither of these accidents resulted in serious injury:

To be honest, it’s the commentary that really gets me. “That kinda blows” ?! Yeah, kinda…