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IP: 30th anniversary of Norjak
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2001 13:50:17 -0500
Date: Sat, 24 Nov 2001 10:38:31 -0800 Subject: 30th anniversary of Norjak From: Paul Saffo <psaffo () iftf org> To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu> Thirty years ago today, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper parachuted out of a northwest 727 and into history. He hijacked NW 305, and forced it back to Seattle. There he swapped its 36 passengers for $200,000 ransom and four parachutes. He then forced NW305 back into the air and after instructing the crew to fly to Mexico, jumped out the tail door somewhere over southern Washington. He was never seen again, and the money --10,000 marked $20s-- never turned up, except for a small cache that eroded out of a riverbank in the forests near the Columbia river a decade later. The FBI concluded that Cooper died in the jump, but the case, labeled "Norjak" in FBI files, was never closed. And whatever his fate, Cooper lived on as a folk legend. D.B.Cooper (the name changed through a reporting error) became the subject of several books( one titled: "Skyjacker's Guide: or Please Hold this Bomb While I go to the Bathroom") , a country western song, a movie, and apparently, even a restaurant or two. Unswayed by the Robin Hood romantics, lead FBI agent, Ralph Himmelsbach described him more bluntly as a "rotten, sleazy crook." (see his authoritative book, "Norjak: The investigation of D.B. Cooper") And Cooper achieved a sort of immortality in the changes his case triggered in the aviation industry. The 727's tail door was redesigned so it couldn't be opened in flight, by addition of a device known to this day as the "Cooper vane." In the months following Cooper's midnight jump, the International Airline Pilots Association held a 24 hour work stoppage to call attention to the need for heightened aircraft security. Congress was urged to ratify an international convention providing for the extradition and severe punishment of hijackers. In February 1972, the FAA promulgated regulations requiring mandatory passenger screening after a survey indicated that less than 40 percent of passengers at the country's 10 largest airports were being screened through magnetometers. Just as the events of September 11th have led to huge lines at airport security checkpoints, back in the early '70s, passengers were forced to stand in interminable lines awaiting exasperating hand searches (after my third such search in one day at Franfkurt airport recently, I resigned myself to thinking of them as police-administered shiatsu). Magnetometer screening was thus a welcome innovation not only for its greater reliability, but also it's speed. And the then-infant Sky Marshall program was greatly expanded. Rumors about Cooper continue to this day. The cash turned up in 1980, and then in August 2000, US News broke the story that the widow of a Florida antique dealer named Duane Weber received a death-bed confession form her husband that he was Dan Cooper. http://www.usnews.com/usnews/doubleissue/mysteries/cooper.htm The US News story is a compelling bow-knot to this three decade old tale, but the cash remains a mystery. And so does Cooper. But after the horrific events of September 11th, one thing is certain. The skyjacking that seemed so terrible in 1971 now strikes one as almost quaint, a throw-back to a time when skyjackers acted with some measure of restraint and were motivated by goals that we could comprehend even as we condemned them. Oh, for such simpler and more innocent times.... -p
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