DB Cooper and Flight 305 - the new book
I got my copy of Edwards' book today, DB Cooper and Flight 305 - Re-Examining the Hijacking and Disappearanceand just finished reading it. A few thoughts/impressions. I revert to my initial assessment of a few days ago - it's an uneven book. On one hand it is an impressive and substantive work, loaded with details and sound analysis. Some of you guys are gonna have orgasms when you read it. But others of us will be reaching for migraine medication, as it is mind-numbing in its minutiae. Imagine reading a thousand 302s without the redactions. Or reading the instructional manual for repairing a transmission on a Mercedes Benz - laudable but only if you're getting paid to fix the damn vehicle.
A couple basic take-aways from Edwards' conclusions. First, he kind of agrees with the "FBI" flight path, i.e.: V-23 all the way, but disagrees with the time of the jump, claiming the NWO/FBI conclusion of 8:11 pm and over Highland, WA is inaccurate. He says this because he feels the FBI and NWO confused the earlier aftstair oscillations as the pressure jump. Edwards posits that they were two different, but related, phenomena.
As a result, he puts DBC jumping at 8:13, and claims that time frame puts Flight 305 on the southern shore of the Columbia. Further, Edwards says that DBC had a 70% likelihood of landing into the Columbia River. He figures Coop's remains are on the eastern shoreline of Hayden Island, a couple of miles west of PDX.
Edwards relies heavily on the recent "302" document release from the FBI, and he benefited from an very intimate relationship with the WSHM. This book is well-annotated and cited, and in that regard has no peer in the Cooper firmament. However, it is not cross-referenced with interviews with any principals. Everyone is based upon the Norjak documentation left behind after the closing in 2016 - from FBI agents, George Harrison's notes, ARCINC transcripts and such.
In short, DB Cooper and Flight 305 - Re-examining the Hijacking and Disappearance is a powerful book. It's also very weighty, and I mean that both metaphorically and physically. Imagine a thick National Geographic magazine with a bullet-proof hard cover. The darn thing is so heavy it almost slipped out of my hands when I first retrieved it up from my mailbox. It's also a very beautiful book - elegant even - and richly peppered with maps and graphs, which are all in color. It's a classy book and a bargain at $29.95. It's hard to figure how Schiffer Publishing is gonna make a dime on this thing unless half of America buys a copy for Christmas.
