Found this article about the early search - putting it here to get away from personal issues going on elsewhere.

Why is this important? It's important because its information related to who knew what when, who did what when, all related to confidence in the flight path in the early stages of the investigation as evidenced by the actual search(s) going on by various people. Someone had to be coordinating these searches. We apparently have no solid info about that in spite of many people writing books! 

Excepts from the article above written on Nov 30th (?) Assoc Press Woodland WA, indicate Boeing freely advised people the Boeing 727 could be jumped. Does this debunk the myth spread on forums that this was Top Secret ?

[ Woodland WA (Assoc Press): Thurs Nov 30, 1971.  POLICE LEAVE SEARCH FOR BAIL-OUT HIJACKER TO FBI. ]
“FBI officials in Portland and Seattle say they will continue their pursuit of the man … but local law enforcement agencies have turned to other chores … said a spokesman for the Clark County Sherriff’s Dept on Monday Nov 27th.

Officials say they had concentrated their search around the Woodland because the jet liner’s flight recorder had indicated small shifts in the plane’s air position as it passed over the area.

A Boeing spokesperson said the 727 is the only commercial jet liner from which a person could bail out successfully. The passenger stairs lower vertically from the tail and “it would be a very safe drop away from the flaps and engines”, the (Boeing) spokesman said.

Scott said that ‘a cockpit indicator showed the rear boarding stairs were lowered at the time the crew last talked to the hijacker’ (near Woodland).   

Clark County Under-Sherriff Tom McDowell summed it up at the end of the second day of searching on Friday (  Nov 30th  ? )   “we’re looking either for a parachute or a hole in the ground."

A Boeing spokesperson said the 727 is the only commercial jet liner from which a person could bail out successfully.
 

Jet jump wasn't hard at all. Just go. The wind blast was strong but no huge deal. I was carrying $85 in negotiable US currency. Lived to tell the story.

One exit that was hard involved an ancient Schweizer 2 seat wooden glider, 1950s vintage. I couldn't fit in the seat with my gear on so they removed the canopy. Had to ride with my legs hanging  over the side of the cockpit. On the ride up behind a crop duster tow plane, we hit some turbulence at about 500 feet. I started hearing loud groans, pops and cracking noises that scared the hell out of me. I thought about termites, dry rot and the owner joking that he had recently bought the glider for only $50. I prayed that we could get a few hundred feet higher before the wings came off. We released the tow cable at about 4500 feet and flew over a cornfield area to jump. When it came time to exit I had a hell of a time getting out of my scrunched in position as there was nothing above me to to grab onto. The glider pilot sitting behind me saw my difficulty and yelled: "I'm going to do some negative Gs, you will float up and then just roll out." It worked. I was very glad to get out of that matchstick airplane. It looked OK but those noises when it was stressed told me that its airframe structure was quite tired.

377

Officials say they had concentrated their search around the Woodland because the jet liner’s flight recorder had indicated small shifts in the plane’s air position as it passed over the area.

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login

Quote

Officials say they had concentrated their search around the Woodland because the jet liner’s flight recorder had indicated small shifts in the plane’s air position as it passed over the area.

As it passed over the area? I wish they would of gave more details in this. seems a lot of people heard, or had knowledge of the FDR...

Keep in mind that the FDR stayed with the airliner and did not arrive back in Seattle until the afternoon of Thanksgiving Day.  So the LE people were already zeroing in on Woodland before they had access to the FDR.  This means that other things also pointed to the Woodland area.

Les Earnest is well known to digital cognoscenti for his contributions to artificial intelligence, robotics and the Internet, but few know of his warning that inadvertent erections could start a nuclear war:

In the 1950s I helped design the SAGE [Semi-Automatic Ground Environment] air defense system … when we reviewed the BOMARC [Missile] launch control system, one of our engineers noticed a rather serious defect: if the launch command system was tested, … the “test” switch was then returned to “operate” without individually resetting the control systems in each missile that had been tested, they would all immediately erect and launch! Needless to say, that “feature” was modified rather soon after we mentioned it to Boeing. …

The SAGE system used land lines to transmit launch commands to the missile site and these lines were duplexed for reliability. … However on examination we discovered that if both lines were bad at the same time, the system would … amplify whatever noise was there and interpret it as a stream of random bits. … Fortunately, we were able to show that getting a complete set of acceptable guidance commands within this time was extremely improbable, so this failure mode did not present a nuclear safety threat. The official name of the first BOMARC model was IM-99A, so I wrote a report about this problem titled Inadvertent erection of the IM-99A.

Les concludes that:

SAGE was a gigantic fraud on taxpayers in that it was a “peacetime defense system” that would malfunction under an actual attack, much like France’s Maginot Line did in World War 2. … SAGE thus gave rise to a corrupt military-industrial-political establishment that has produced a string of largely useless command-control and weapons projects such as President Reagan’s phony “Star Wars” defense program and the current ongoing deployment of anti-missile systems that don’t work. But that is another story.

Whether or not one agrees with Les’ assessment of missile defense, in the Alice-in-Wonderland world of nuclear strategy, some supposed safeguards have the potential to turn around and bite us. A short clip from Peter Sellers’ classic movie Dr. Strangelove makes that point all too well. In this scene, the president has just been informed that a rogue general is in the process of starting World War III: