November 24, 1971: The Passenger in Seat 18C

The afternoon flight from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington, was supposed to be a quick, thirty-minute routine hop. It was the night before Thanksgiving, and Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 was only half-full with passengers traveling home for the holiday. Among them was a man carrying a dark briefcase who had purchased his ticket under the name “Dan Cooper.” He sat quietly in seat 18C, wearing a dark suit, a white shirt, a black tie, and wrapped in a black raincoat. To the flight crew, he looked like any other corporate businessman traveling on a rainy Northwest evening.

Shortly after takeoff, Cooper handed a folded note to Florence Schaffner, a twenty-three-year-old flight attendant. Assuming it was simply a lonely traveler leaving his phone number, she dropped the slip into her pocket without looking. Cooper leaned slightly toward her and whispered that she had better look at the note, noting that he had a bomb in his briefcase.

Schaffner sat beside him and watched as he opened the briefcase just enough for her to glimpse what appeared to be a bomb with red cylinders, wires, and a large battery. Cooper’s demands were calm and precise: he wanted $200,000 in negotiable American currency—all in twenty-dollar bills—along with four parachutes and a fuel truck standing by in Seattle. The notes were relayed to the pilots, who immediately notified air traffic control and the FBI.

For the next two hours, the airliner circled Seattle in the dark while federal agents frantically gathered the cash from local banks and scrambled to find civilian sport parachutes. In the cabin, Cooper remained entirely polite. He ordered a second drink, paid his tab, insisted that the flight crew be fed upon landing, and kept a pair of dark sunglasses over his eyes. The regular passengers remained completely unaware that their flight had been taken over; the captain had announced that the delay was due to a minor mechanical issue.

At 5:39 p.m., the plane finally touched down at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. Cooper allowed all thirty-six passengers and one flight attendant to leave the aircraft in exchange for the canvas bag of cash and the parachutes. With only the pilots, a flight engineer, and one flight attendant left on board, Cooper ordered the aircraft to fly toward Reno, Nevada, giving strict flight instructions: keep the landing gear down, the wing flaps angled low, and the cabin completely unpressurized at an altitude below 10,000 feet.

Somewhere between Seattle and Reno, over the dense, pitch-black forests near the Lewis River in southwest Washington, the aircraft’s tail section experienced a sudden upward jerk. Cooper had lowered the plane’s unique rear exit stairs while in mid-air. He strapped the heavy bag of ransom money to his waist, donned two of the parachutes, and stepped off the stairs into a driving rainstorm. The flight took place in darkness and sub-freezing temperatures, with the wilderness below thick with pine trees. The aircraft later landed safely in Reno with the aft stairs still deployed.