A hostage aboard DB Cooper’s hijacked flight has opened up about the experience and the hijacker’s character during the flight.
According to the hostage, Cooper was cool and in charge and then stared at the hostages like he was the boss on the flight.
Michael Cooper was traveling home for Thanksgiving when his flight, Northwest Orient 305, was hijacked on November 24, 1971, by a smartly dressed man identifying himself as Dan Cooper.
Then a 31-year-old teacher at Missoula Sentinel High School in Montana, Michael had ducked out of his classes early to make the flight, which first took off from Missoula at 1:13 pm.
The Boeing 727 stopped in Spokane and then Portland, where DB Cooper boarded, took a seat in the last row of the aircraft just behind Michael, and ordered a bourbon and 7UP.
Shortly after taking off for the final leg of the journey to Seattle, a sunglasses and suit-clad Dan Cooper – or DB, as he’d become known – handed a note to a flight attendant warning her he had a bomb in his suitcase.
In exchange for the lives of everyone onboard, Cooper was seeking two things: $200,000 in $20 bills and four parachutes.
This is what Michael said about the hijacker.
“He was probably in his 40s, and he was wearing a jacket and a tie and he was just real quiet”.
“He had a little briefcase and took the middle seat of the back row, which I thought was kind of unusual, but at that time I had no idea that anything bad was happening.
“Then something else strange happened when we took off: the stewardess came down and sat next to him in the aisle seat, and they were engrossed in a deep conversation.
“He never got up to go to the bathroom, which I had to do at one stage.
“But I couldn’t catch wind of anything he or the flight attendant were saying.
“He was just, I would say, cool. Whenever I looked at him, he just looked right back and stared at me, like he was the boss.”
I can imagine being on a hijacked flight. It’s going to be a terrible experience even if no one is killed in the process of the hijacking.
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