It strikes me that people tend to fall into one of two DB Cooper Camps.
1) The guy was exceptionally sophisticated...a black ops type...who beat the system to get back at the government for some reason.
2) The guy was an idiot who just got lucky...or perhaps no-pulled and therefore unlucky.
As for me, I tend to think he was clever, bold, and desperate...not a genius...and that the primary reason he got away was because he happened to start-off one or two steps ahead of the authorities. I think it's as simple as that.
Moreover, it seems very likely that if he no-pulled something would have been discovered. Or, at least some mortgage, car or utility payments would have started to go unpaid and would have eventually tipped off the authorities.
I agree with this line of thought. Robert, I’ll respond with some speculation on how he may have known where he was in the air. Later when I am back to a laptop and not an iPhone. I think he got very lucky many times, and if he knew where he was in the air, it was due to a combination of luck and skill.
Okay. But please don't speculate along the lines of Jo Weber's "navigational underwear" or the more recent claims of the capabilities of a Japanese wrist watch.
Robert: I'm just getting a chance to follow up on our discussion about whether Cooper knew where he was in the air. EU basically summed it up in his comment about Cooper---
"As for me, I tend to think he was clever, bold, and desperate...not a genius...and that the primary reason he got away was because he happened to start-off one or two steps ahead of the authorities. I think it's as simple as that."
I picture Cooper as being smart, but not an off the charts IQ guy, but not dumb either. Maybe a guy who was smarter than his bosses, but for some reason could not translate that into moving up the chain of command. So, with that said, I believe Cooper may have thought he could outsmart everyone else on Flight 305 and the FBI, and in some cases he did, but to EU's point about starting off two steps ahead, I think Cooper was just very lucky. He was prepared, but not Special Ops prepared, and then things started going his way. The whole deal about him getting giddy when he actually got the money makes me think he was saying in his head "Wow, I never thought I'd get this far", I also think he may have had a plan after he got arrested. A number of hijackers did not go to prison for life. We don't know what he had in his background, or what his connections were. My guess is he accepted that he might go to prison.
Rather than clog this up with one long post, I'll do a second on on why I think he could have known where he was in the air.
Could Cooper have known where he was in the air?
SEATAC to Portland is around 135 miles. Let's assume Cooper thinks he knows better than the average guy. He thinks the plane will fly south, he's told the pilots to go with 15 degree flaps, so he has a general speed of the plane. He's said to fly at 10,000 feet, maybe because it's a round number, or likely to keep the plane in a corridor. He also probably knows the Victor Airways there. Maybe he's flown the trip before (invest $25 for a few flights, knowing you might get $200k). Why not 12,000 feet? Or 11,000? Oxygen is not needed until around 13,000 or so, I'm not sure when the masks deploy on the plane, so I think he could have flown a little higher.
So now he knows the direction, the speed, and the general location left/right, up/down. He knows Tacoma (as many of you have said because he's from there), so all he has to do is make a few glances out the window to see that he's now past Tacoma, then there is Fort Lewis/McChord, where he would have seen lights from the base, or the lights at the airport, he has Interstate 5, Lake Merwin Dam, or dams on the Cowlitz River.
The impact of flying in that area is that it goes from city to country real fast, Tacoma turns into wide open country, so he goes from lights to no lights, and he knows the next set of major lights he will see will be Vancouver or Portland.
We know that he was possibly hanging on those stairs for close to 30 minutes, we also know that the 302's did not get into a lot of nitty gritty details (I'd still like to hear recordings from those interviews). How do we know that he did not glance out the windows and how do we know what he was doing after Tina left him to go to the cockpit and before he jumped?
For those who were in Boy Scouts or the military (Marines-Army), you may have learned to count steps when walking through terrain, and would be able to keep track of where you were on a map. For the aerial types, especially a Korean War era vet who was a pilot, navigator, air crew, etc, they would have known how to track location based on time and speed as well (think of all the World War II bombers that had navigators who could not always count on radio beacons).
I think Cooper thought he could tell where he was. Whether he was successful in knowing where he was is unknown, but flying south from SEATAC, knowing the air speed, having a watch/stopwatch, having landmarks, knowing the general route, looking out the windows and the back stairs, all was enough for Cooper to have a good idea of where he was.
Just my theory. Again, he could have just been very lucky.
The AIRSPEED is not the controlling factor here. The GROUND SPEED is what is important and Cooper did not have a means to determine it. Further, the airspeed and ground speed were not constant. They varied during the initial climb out of Seattle. After levelling off at 10,000 feet and flying at a constant airspeed, the ground speed varied depending on the aircraft heading with respect to the winds aloft.
There was an overcast at 5000 feet and two or three additional cloud layers below that. It is highly unlikely that Cooper could see any land marks on the ground under those weather and night time conditions. For large cities, Cooper may have been able to see the "glow" from the city lights but he would not be able to determine any land marks.
Cooper did not specify any route from Seattle to Portland or Reno. There were, and still are, two different Victor airways between Seattle and Portland and Cooper did not have any means to determine which one the airliner took.
I'll try to redo the flight path numbers in the next few days using the latest winds aloft information from Tom Kaye. We'll discuss this matter further after that.
Robert-I'd buy into the airspeed/ground speed more if they were flying west to east or vice versa. I still think it is possible that Cooper thought he could beat the system here. The man took over a jetliner, took $200k, and jumped, so if he lived in that fantasy world, why not in a world where he could determine his location along a 135 mile route?
As far as the airways go. I only have handy the most recent maps, which may have changed since 1971, but they show V23 and V495 coming out of Seattle, and V23 turns into V287 at Malay. I'm suggesting that he suspected the plane would fly south, and not fly east or west and make an end around, or worse, fly over the ocean, or avoid the cities due to the bomb. All these variables would be hard to plan for, hence my belief that he got really lucky a few times in a row.
Sluggo's site had a good summary of the airways, but I have not been able to track it down on Wayback Machine or another site. If anyone has a link, please provide it. I thought there was some talk about bringing it back up. $1200 was a price I think I remember, but it really would cost quite a bit less, and I think some of us could chip in and get it back up.
There is a strong possibility that Cooper saw nothing except the glow that Anderson talked about. However, if things had gone the way he thought they might go, he might have been expecting to see more than he did. The fog there in Portland is quite thick and seeing it in person gives one a different perspective on things.
Quick question - is one route or the other more challenging for a skydiver? The one thing I never thought of before was that UNTIL TINA RETURNED TO THE COCKPIT, THE PILOTS HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING IF COOPER WAS TAKING HER WITH HIM. This is key because if Cooper looked to be planning a solo jump, Rataczak might have chosen a more perilous route - rougher terrain, more time over the Columbia - whereas if they thought Tina was going with, they might have sought to minimize the danger (at least until she returned to the cockpit.) BR has mentioned several times that he wanted Cooper dead; but he couldn't put the skyjacker in more peril until Tina was safe. I have NO idea if the peril factor was something the pilots would have taken into account at all when choosing the route, but if they were thinking that way, they would have sought to minimize peril until Tina came back to the cockpit. In fact, the only reason the pilots didn't escape themselves and let the Feds do their thing was because Tina was with Cooper (on the ground at Seattle.)
Keep in mind, there were trained negotiators on hand, if needed. One in the Portland office, for one. Another FAA trained negotiator waiting in Seattle who requested to talk to Cooper but was turned down. It was very important for everyone to follow the script the hijacker himself had given. Nyrop told everyone to cooperate. That was key! Tina reinforced that with Cooper several times throughout. "Cooper's script" played out with everyone playing their part and he bailed, enabled by everyone doing their parts. The FAA psychiatrist's script was ignored - thank God!
Cooper set the script for what he wanted and what he was going to do, right from the start! He gave no evidence of being a martyr conducting a jihad, bent on destruction - in fact, just the opposite.
In fact, Cooper showed from the start he was flexible and willing to negotiate, and he did. That isn't the script of a radical or a crazy person hallucinating some destructive agenda. Keep in mind, there were no assets in place to prevent Cooper from some destructive agenda if that was in his thoughts. The hijacking went down exactly as Cooper scripted it ... and the FAA psychiatrist was left with his 'theory'!
