D.B. Cooper (1971): The night jump — Section 950: The night jump

On 24 November 1971 a man calling himself Dan Cooper hijacked Northwest Orient Flight 305, took $200,000 in Seattle and jumped from a Boeing 727; he was never found. On the afternoon of 24 November 1971, the day before Thanksgiving, a man who bought a one-way ticket under the name Dan Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727-51 registered N467US, at Portland International Airport. After takeoff for Seattle he passed a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner and later showed her what she took to be a bomb in his briefcase. He demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. The aircraft circled Puget Sound while the airline and the Federal Bureau of Investigation assembled the money and chutes at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.

Passengers were released at Seattle after the ransom and parachutes came aboard. Captain William Scott, First Officer William Rataczak, flight engineer Harold E. Anderson and flight attendant Tina Mucklow remained. Cooper ordered a course toward Mexico City, a refueling stop at Reno, flaps and landing gear down, and a low, slow flight. Somewhere after takeoff from Seattle, over southwestern Washington in darkness and rain, he lowered the aft airstairs and left the aircraft. When the 727 landed at Reno at 23:45 PST the stairs were still down and Cooper was gone.

The FBI opened case NORJAK — Northwest hijacking. Serial numbers of the $20 bills were recorded. In February 1980 a boy, Brian Ingram, found three deteriorating packets of those bills, about $5,800 face value, on a Columbia River sandbar later called Tena Bar, near Vancouver, Washington. No confirmed remains, parachute or unused ransom cache has been found. The Bureau suspended active investigation on 12 July 2016, leaving the file unsolved.