January 14, 2001

9:42 AM

Remember last year's story about the plane hijacker in the Philippines who jumped with a home-made parachute and died? Here's the story from the point of view of the crew and the flight attendant who pushed him off of the plane.
posted by lia (5 comments total)

In a related story:
Does anyone know what really happened to D.B. Copper (I think that is the guy's name)? The guy who hijacked a plain and the jumped out of it over the Oregon forest with a ton of money in the 70s.
posted by Bag Man at 3:39 PM on January 14, 2001

Bag Man: Didn't you ever watch NewsRadio? Jimmy James did it! :)
(sorry, bad reference)
posted by pnevares at 3:51 PM on January 14, 2001

Only D.B. and God know.

ooper dove into a freezing rainstorm at 10,000 feet, wearing only a business suit and loafers. The temperature was 7 below zero, not counting a wind chill factor estimated at minus 70 because of the plane's speed of 200 mph. The FBI agent assigned to the case has long maintained Cooper was a bumbler and a fool. If the cold didn't kill him, if he withstood the powerful turbulence, Cooper was still parachuting into dense forest at night, at the onset of winter, with no food or survival gear. [here]

They've never found any evidence to confirm his survival or death. There was a bag of money found washed deep into a sandbank on an Oregon river. Much of the area was blanketed by ash from the Mt. St. Helens eruption, which further cuts the chances of finding anything.
posted by dhartung at 5:26 PM on January 14, 2001

The authorities recorded the serial numbers off every bill of the money given to D.B. Cooper; they've been watching over the years for it to appear.

Someone found some degraded bills on a sandbank on the Columbia river, and of those whose serial numbers could be read, all were on that list. It's now generally thought that he died. But it's one of those things which will probably never really be settled, unless someone finds a skeleton out in the woods somewhere. They never did identify who he was, for instance. I doubt anyone is working on the case seriously anymore; it happened a long time ago.
posted by Steven Den Beste at 5:28 PM on January 14, 2001

To get back on topic:

I hope somebody pays that flight attendant a cartload of cash for the TV movie rights. He deserves every penny.
posted by Optamystic at 5:53 PM on January 14, 2001