D. B. Cooper
Unidentified man who hijacked an airplane in 1971 · Historical Figures
In 1971, a man who called himself Dan Cooper jumped out of a hijacked 727 with $200,000 and vanished into the Northwest woods. A reporter's typo turned him into D. B. Cooper, and fifty years later no one knows who he was or whether he survived the fall.
D. B. Cooper is read about 5,060 times a day, in 47 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 8 November 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 402 days, one point a day.
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About this person
On November 24, 1971, an unidentified man boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle, told the crew he had a bomb, and demanded $200,000 and four parachutes. After the plane landed and passengers were released, he ordered the crew to fly toward Mexico City, then opened the aft door somewhere over Southwest Washington and jumped into the night. In 1980, $5,800 of the ransom turned up along the Columbia River, but the rest of the money and the man were never found. The FBI investigated for 45 years, building a thick file with no conclusion, and suspended the case in 2016. The hijacking triggered the era of airport metal detectors and baggage screening, and remains the only unsolved air piracy in commercial aviation history.