Has anyone heard of him before? I read an article about him yesterday and it was pretty weird.

Basically he hijacked a PDX-SEA flight in 1971 and received parachutes and $200,000 when he landed in SEA. He then ordered the flight crew to fly him to Mexico but he parachuted out of the 727 in mid air near Mt. St. Helens never to be seen again.

I spent a lot of my life around commercial aviation, but I never heard of that story until yesterday.

That was a big story way back when. They never did find him; although they thought they found some of the money near a river/stream several years later.

Some thought he died bacause they never found any traces of him.

Methinks D.B.Cooper is somewhere with Jimmy Hoffa.

Fairly solid circumstantial evidence identifies D.B. Cooper(?)

More at this U.S. News article

I have heard of the legend but ever read that US News article.. fascinating stuff!

I remember the incident. Wonderful mystery. IIRC,after the incident, the airlines, routinely closed the back door. Shall we all give to DB Cooper? Seems that airline security started after his bail-out.

Gary Larson posited a rather humorous solution to the mystery. Sadly, I can't find a copy of his cartoon panel online.

I believe D.B. Cooper was the first airplane hijacker. Airport security began after this and has gotten tighter every year since.

Welcome to FT. Good idea to read previous posts prior to your posts Anyway, welcome aboard.

There was even a crap movie starring Treat Williams years ago about this.

DB Cooper was neither the first hijacker nor in any way significantly responsible for security screening at US airports.

In the last half of the 1960s, US flights regularly wound up in Havana. In the late 60s/early 70s, the Middle East caught on, and several flights to/from Israel were hijacked. DB Cooper may have been the first to see hijacking as strictly a revenue opportunity rather than a political statement, but he was way down the list in the hijacking timeline.

Semi-OT: Nashua, NH boasts a decent restaurant named DB Cooper's (or at least it did for 20 years or so, not sure if it still exists).

NOPE. iN THE LATE 60'S THEY STARTED HIJACKING PLANES TO CUBA.

And there's a recent crap movie that touches on this story, too.

I remember that one!! It had me in stitches.

The title was something like "What Really Happened to DB Cooper" and it had a guy parachuting down into a fenced-off area that had a sign saying something like "Joe's Rotweiller Farm."

LMAO

This was a Northwest flight, on a 727 I believe (when they were actually new). As a matter of fact the capitan of that flight just retired a couple of years ago!

Yep. That's when the first "string" of airline hijackings took place. Despite the horror of what it's like to be on the business end of a pistol, most of them ended up fairly peacefully. They almost seem like benign hijackings by today's terrorist standards. Sometimes just a poor sap that wanted to get home.

Late night monologues and various comedy skits would often poke fun at these hijackings. "Take this train to Havana!" That sort of thing.

Wow. This question just shows my old age, I guess. In my aged mind this is like asking "Has anyone heard of Richard Nixon before?" I mean...to an old fart like me it's sorta like "Well, who hasn't heard of D.B. Cooper?"

You could not have lived back then and missed it. It was the O.J. or Scott Petersen or Martha Stewart or Enron story of it's time. Big news when it happened. And very quickly developed into both real and urban legend! Books, mini-series, movies...the works. Probably a theme park or bungee-jump ride out there somewhere named after him.