Level C1

D.B. Cooper

The Man Who Jumped Out of a Plane and Vanished

The day before Thanksgiving in 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper took over a plane with a briefcase bomb, collected a ransom of $200,000 and jumped into the rainy night over Washington. Olivia and Sean follow the clues, the copycats and the suspects in the only airline hijacking that has never been solved.

↓ Download the printable PDF

Key words

These words appear in the episode. In the transcript, hover over or tap a highlighted word to see what it means.

hijackverb

To take control of a plane, ship or vehicle by force, usually to make demands.

My little brother hijacked the TV remote and refused to give it back until his cartoon was over.

ransomnoun

Money that someone demands before they will free a person or give something back.

The thieves who stole the famous painting asked for a ransom, and the museum refused to pay.

hostagenoun

A person who is held by force until other people agree to certain demands.

The film is about a bank robbery where the robbers keep three customers as hostages all night.

overrideverb

To take control of a machine or system and stop what it is doing automatically.

The manager can override the till if a customer needs a refund after thirty days.

speculateverb

To guess possible reasons or answers when you do not have all the facts.

Everyone at work is speculating about why the boss suddenly cancelled his holiday.

combverb

To search a place very carefully, looking in every part of it.

We combed the whole flat for my car keys and finally found them in the fridge.

go coldphrase

Of a trail or an investigation: to stop producing any new clues.

The police had a few leads in the first week, but then the trail went cold.

driftverb

To be carried slowly along by water or air, without any control.

Our inflatable boat drifted away from the beach while we were busy eating sandwiches.

copycatnoun

Someone who copies another person's actions, especially a crime that got a lot of attention.

When the café's rainbow cake went viral, half the bakeries in town turned into copycats.

rule outphrasal verb

To decide that something is not possible or that someone is not responsible.

The doctor has ruled out a broken wrist, but she still wants me to rest it for a week.

get away withphrasal verb

To do something wrong without being caught or punished.

He turns up late to every meeting, and somehow he always gets away with it.

folk heronoun

A person that ordinary people admire and tell stories about, often because they challenged people in power.

The farmer who refused to sell his land to the airport became a local folk hero.

sleazyadjective

Dishonest and unpleasant in a way that makes people distrust you.

The villain in the series is a sleazy car dealer who lies to every single customer.

cheekyadjective

Slightly rude or bold, often in a way that is also a bit funny.

It was rather cheeky of him to ask for a pay rise on his second day.

lighten the moodphrase

To make a tense or serious situation feel more relaxed.

When the meeting got tense, Maria told a story about her cat to lighten the mood.

Did you understand?

Choose the correct answer.

1. Why did Florence Schaffner put Cooper's note in her purse without reading it?

2. What did Cooper do with the printed sheet explaining how to use the parachutes?

3. Apart from two parachutes, what did the captain find in the cabin in Reno?

4. Why did the money found at Tena Bar make the case more confusing?

5. What did the volunteers find when they examined the tie in 2009?

Exercise 1

Two truths and a lie

Each round has two true statements about the episode and one lie. Find the lie.

1 / 4

2 / 4

3 / 4

4 / 4

Exercise 2

Crossword

All the answers are key words from the episode.

Across

2 The pilots could not do this to the rear stairs from the cockpit. (8)
3 The four parachutes hinted that Cooper might take one of these with him. (7)
5 Sean's word for a suspect who worked for the very airline that was hijacked. (6)
6 What a bundle of notes does if it floats down the Columbia River for months. (5)
9 Himmelsbach's word for Cooper, right after "rotten". (6)

Down

1 What Cooper did to a Boeing 727 with a briefcase and a folded note. (6)
4 What people around Thanksgiving dinner in Bellingham still do about where Cooper landed. (9)
7 In Cooper's case, ten thousand twenty-dollar bills. (6)
8 Richard McCoy, in one word, unless he really was Cooper himself. (7)

Exercise 3

Your turn

Did D.B. Cooper die in the woods that night, or did he walk away? Give your view in three or four sentences. Use at least two words from the list.

Your text is saved on this device.

I think he died that night, even though it is tempting to believe he got away with it. The soldiers who combed the forest found nothing, but the FBI may simply have searched the wrong area. Apart from the bundles on Tena Bar, nobody ever found or spent a single note of the ransom. A man who jumped into freezing rain in loafers probably never made it to the ground in one piece.

Full transcript

Show the transcript

Olivia

Eight thirteen in the evening, somewhere over southwest Washington, and the tail of a Boeing seven two seven suddenly lurches upwards.

Sean

Turbulence?

Olivia

Most likely, it was the plane's last passenger stepping off the back stairs.

Sean

In flight? In the dark?

Olivia

In the rain, with two hundred thousand dollars tied around his waist.

Sean

And where did he land?

Olivia

Nobody knows. Nobody has seen him since.

Sean

This is Aprendos English, level C1. I'm Sean.

Olivia

And I'm Olivia.

Sean

Right then, I know the name D.B. Cooper, although that's roughly where my knowledge ends.

Olivia

Which is perfect, because where I grew up, in Bellingham, he's practically a member of the family. He jumped over the forests a few hours' drive south of us, and people up there still argue about him over Thanksgiving dinner.

Sean

Why Thanksgiving, of all days?

Olivia

Because it happened the day before, on Wednesday the twenty-fourth of November, 1971. At Portland airport, a man in his mid-forties pays cash for a one-way ticket to Seattle, a flight of barely half an hour.

Sean

Under what name?

Olivia

Dan Cooper. He's wearing a dark suit with a thin black tie, and he takes seat eighteen E, right at the back. Shortly after takeoff, he hands a folded note to the flight attendant sitting behind him, Florence Schaffner. Guess what she thought it was.

Sean

His phone number?

Olivia

Exactly that, so she dropped it into her purse without even opening it.

Sean

Poor chap, that must have stung a bit…

Olivia

…except that he leans towards her and whispers, "Miss, you'd better look at that note. I have a bomb."

Sean

Oh, good grief.

Olivia

The note was neatly printed in capitals with a felt-tip pen. It read, "Miss, I have a bomb in my briefcase and want you to sit by me."

Sean

And did she?

Olivia

She did, and then she calmly asked to see the bomb. He opened the case just far enough to show her a large battery wired up to eight red cylinders, which she took to be dynamite.

Sean

And he wants to go to Cuba, I suppose, like every other hijacker in those days…

Olivia

…he wants something far more practical. He wanted two hundred thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills, along with four parachutes waiting for him in Seattle.

Sean

Four? Is he planning to take the whole crew with him?

Olivia

That was the clever part, because if you ask for four, the authorities have to assume you might force a to jump with you…

Sean

…so nobody dares to hand you a parachute that doesn't open.

Olivia

Precisely. Another flight attendant, Tina Mucklow, sat beside him for the rest of the journey. She later told the FBI that he seemed completely calm and rather nice. At one point he glanced out of the window and remarked, "Looks like Tacoma down there."

Sean

So he knew the area.

Olivia

He did. When she mentioned that the parachutes were coming from McChord Air Force Base, he pointed out that it was only about twenty minutes' drive from the airport.

Sean

Which isn't exactly common knowledge for your average travelling salesman.

Olivia

Remember that, because it matters later. The passengers were told there was a minor mechanical problem, and the plane circled over Puget Sound for two hours while the airline got the money together. The FBI photographed all ten thousand twenty-dollar bills on microfilm before they went anywhere near the plane.

Sean

So they had the serial numbers, which means he can never spend a cent without somebody noticing.

Olivia

They land in Seattle at a quarter to six, and once Mucklow has brought him the money, he lets all thirty-five passengers go. While he's checking the money, she tries to by jokingly asking whether she can have some.

Sean

Uh-oh. What did he do?

Olivia

He handed her a whole bundle of notes without a moment's hesitation, and she gave it straight back, because accepting tips was against company policy.

Sean

She's in the middle of a hijacking, and she's quoting the staff handbook.

Olivia

Then the parachutes come on board, and she hands him a printed sheet explaining how to use them…

Sean

…which he studies very carefully, I hope, because that's exactly what I'd…

Olivia

…which he waves away, because he says he doesn't need any instructions.

Sean

Well, I'd have read them. Twice, with a highlighter.

Olivia

I know. You read the instructions on a packet of microwave rice.

Sean

It's a surprisingly complicated product.

Olivia

Next they agree on a flight to Mexico City, stopping in Reno for fuel. He wants the plane to fly low and very slowly, with the wing flaps set at exactly fifteen degrees.

Sean

That's oddly specific for a travelling salesman.

Olivia

One of the pilots later told the FBI the man clearly knew a great deal about flying. His final instruction was that the rear door had to be opened.

Sean

The rear door of a passenger jet?

Olivia

The seven two seven has a staircase that folds down from underneath the tail, so that passengers can board from the back…

Sean

…oh, the rear stairs! I actually know something about those.

Olivia

Please, enlighten me.

Sean

That staircase could be lowered in mid-air, and the switch was at the back of the cabin, so the pilots couldn't it from the cockpit. Hardly any airline crews knew that. The FBI later that Cooper knew the CIA had used seven two sevens to drop agents and supplies during the Vietnam War.

Olivia

At about twenty to eight they take off again, with nobody on board apart from Cooper and four crew members. Two fighter jets from McChord follow at a distance, trying to stay out of his sight.

Sean

Fighter jets! Well, at least they'll see him jump.

Olivia

You'd think so, wouldn't you? A few minutes after takeoff, he sends Mucklow up to the cockpit and tells her to stay there. As she turned round, she saw him standing in the aisle, tying what looked like the money bag around his waist.

Sean

And that's the last time…

Olivia

…that anyone saw D.B. Cooper, yes. Around eight o'clock, a warning light in the cockpit shows that the stairs are down. Then at eight thirteen comes the jolt, when the tail suddenly pitches upwards.

Sean

And the fighter pilots?

Olivia

They saw nothing at all, because it was a dark, cloudy night and he was dressed in black. The plane lands in Reno just after eleven with the stairs still hanging down, and the captain searches the cabin himself.

Sean

Empty.

Olivia

Empty, apart from two of the four parachutes and a black clip-on tie with a mother-of-pearl tie clip, lying on his seat.

Sean

Wait, a clip-on tie? A man who plans every detail down to the angle of the flaps simply forgets his tie?

Olivia

He'd even made Mucklow return his notes and an empty matchbook. He took back everything except the tie.

Sean

And the name? Where does "D.B." come from?

Olivia

From a reporter. Rushing to meet his deadline that night, a journalist at the Oregon Journal wrote "D.B. Cooper" instead of "Dan Cooper," and the news agencies copied the mistake.

Sean

So a typo became a legend.

Olivia

More or less. Now, one more detail about the parachutes. One of the reserve chutes was a dummy that a skydiving school used for teaching, and its canopy had been sewn shut. That was one of the two that went out of the door with him.

Sean

So he jumped with a parachute that didn't work?

Olivia

He had a proper main parachute on his back as well. But some agents took the missing dummy as a sign that he hadn't noticed it was fake, which an expert surely would have.

Sean

So he was an amateur.

Olivia

Larry Carr, who led the investigation in the late two thousands, certainly thought so. He said in 2007 that no experienced parachutist would have jumped on a pitch-black night in the rain, wearing loafers and a trench coat.

Sean

Loafers! At ten thousand feet, in November. My feet are cold just thinking about it.

Olivia

On the other hand, the man who had packed those parachutes, Earl Cossey, told the FBI that anyone with six or seven practice jumps could have done it.

Sean

So the experts can't even agree on whether he was an expert.

Olivia

That's the Cooper case in a single sentence. The search focused on the forests around Lake Merwin, near a tiny town called Ariel. In the spring of 1972, around two hundred soldiers spent weeks those woods, and a salvage company even sent a small submarine down into the lake.

Sean

A submarine? For one man in a raincoat?

Olivia

And they found absolutely nothing. Later on, the FBI concluded that the plane had probably flown further east, so they may well have searched the wrong forest.

Sean

Can I make a slightly embarrassing confession? Three birthdays ago my sister gave me a voucher for a tandem skydive, and it's still stuck to my fridge. I've extended it twice.

Olivia

Sean! That's in broad daylight, strapped to a professional!

Sean

I know, and I still can't face it. Anyway, after the search, the trail simply ?

Olivia

For years. The FBI sent the serial numbers to banks and casinos, yet not one note turned up anywhere.

Sean

So he never spent the money. Which rather suggests…

Olivia

…that he never had the chance, or that he was very, very patient.

Sean

Or that he's been sitting in a beach bar in Mexico since 1971, paying with his charm.

Olivia

Then, in February 1980, a family spends the day on a sandy beach called Tena Bar, on the Columbia River, just downstream from Vancouver, Washington. Guess who found the money.

Sean

A fisherman, I'd say, or somebody walking their dog.

Olivia

An eight-year-old boy called Brian Ingram. He was raking the sand to make room for a campfire, and he dug up three bundles of rotting twenty-dollar bills, still held together with rubber bands.

Sean

No! How much?

Olivia

Five thousand eight hundred dollars, and the serial numbers matched.

Sean

Well, that settles it, then. He came down in the river…

Olivia

…and this is exactly where it gets complicated. If those bundles had been since 1971, the rubber bands should have rotted away long before 1980.

Sean

So somebody buried them there later?

Olivia

Possibly. In 2020, researchers studied tiny algae stuck to the notes and found only the kinds that bloom in spring. So the money probably reached the water months after the jump.

Sean

So the one real clue just makes it more confusing.

Olivia

Welcome to my childhood. At twelve I ran a little neighborhood newsletter, and my very first "investigation" was D.B. Cooper. Our mail carrier swore Cooper had once bought coffee from his cousin in Longview, and I put it on the front page.

Sean

Without a second source, I assume.

Olivia

Without any source at all, since the cousin turned out not to exist.

Sean

A promising start to a career. Right then, may I take over for a moment? I know rather more about what happened next than you'd expect.

Olivia

Oh? Go ahead.

Sean

Cooper appeared to it, so in 1972 there were fifteen hijackings in which somebody demanded parachutes along with the .

Olivia

Fifteen! And did any of them get away?

Sean

Not one. Five of them actually jumped and landed safely, and every one of them was caught soon afterwards. The best known was Richard McCoy, a Vietnam veteran and keen skydiver from Utah, who a United seven two seven in April 1972.

Olivia

With the same rear stairs?

Sean

The same stairs. He demanded half a million dollars and four parachutes, and he jumped out over Provo, in Utah. Unfortunately for him, he left behind his handwritten instructions and his fingerprints on a magazine.

Olivia

So much for planning. And he couldn't even blame a clip-on tie.

Sean

He was arrested two days later, and he got forty-five years…

Olivia

…wait, I actually know about McCoy, because some people back home are convinced he was Cooper…

Sean

…and they're in good company, because a parole officer and a former FBI agent wrote a whole book in 1991 arguing exactly that.

Olivia

And in 2024 his children said publicly that he was Cooper, after a YouTuber found a parachute on land that had belonged to McCoy's mother. The FBI hasn't confirmed anything.

Sean

The trouble is that McCoy was twenty-nine, while every witness described a man in his mid-forties. When the flight attendants were shown his photo, they all agreed he wasn't their man.

Olivia

McCoy didn't smoke or drink either, whereas our man smoked his way through the whole afternoon. Agents found eight cigarette butts in his ashtray, which were later destroyed while the FBI still had them.

Sean

You're not serious. Well, the did change one thing. Every seven two seven got a small metal flap near the stairs, which the rushing air pushes into place so they can't open in flight.

Olivia

I can guess what it's called.

Sean

The Cooper vane. And from 1973, American airlines had to search every passenger and every bag. So whenever you queue at airport security, you can partly thank our friend in eighteen E.

Olivia

Okay, the suspects. By 1976 the FBI had looked at more than eight hundred people.

Sean

Eight hundred! So who's the favourite?

Olivia

My personal favourite is Kenneth Christiansen, who actually worked for Northwest Orient.

Sean

The same airline? That's rather .

Olivia

He'd been an army paratrooper, and later he worked as a purser for Northwest, based in Seattle. In 2003 his brother Lyle watched a TV documentary and became convinced that Kenneth, who had died in 1994, was the hijacker.

Sean

That's quite a leap to make after one documentary.

Olivia

It is, although he smoked and he liked bourbon, and as a Northwest employee he would have known those planes. Florence Schaffner even told an author that his photos matched her memory more closely than any other suspect's, although she couldn't be certain.

Sean

Coming from the woman who sat right beside him, that's quite something.

Olivia

The FBI isn't persuaded, though. Christiansen was shorter and thinner than the witnesses described, and there's no direct evidence linking him to the crime.

Sean

So it stays a theory. Who else?

Olivia

Robert Rackstraw, a Vietnam veteran and pilot who once tried to fake his own death by radioing a false mayday.

Sean

Well, that's hardly going to help his case.

Olivia

He was only twenty-eight in 1971, however, and the FBI in 1979. A book revived the theory in 2016, but he denied it.

Sean

My guess for the next one: somebody who worked at Boeing.

Olivia

Oh, very good! Sheridan Peterson was a former smokejumper, which means he parachuted into forest fires, and he was forty-four at the time. He'd also worked at Boeing in Seattle as a technical editor.

Sean

That sounds almost too perfect.

Olivia

He loved teasing reporters, although he told the FBI he'd been in Nepal at the time. One researcher, Eric Ulis, was once ninety-eight percent convinced, but a DNA comparison shown on television didn't match.

Sean

Always leave yourself two percent for the DNA. What bothers me, though, is how much everybody seems to adore this man.

Olivia

Adore is a strong word…

Sean

…there are T-shirts, Olivia. He threatened to blow up a plane full of people the day before Thanksgiving, and somehow he's become a charming .

Olivia

I get that. But nobody was hurt, and the money came from an airline that was insured anyway. Where I grew up, that makes him a bit of a Robin Hood.

Sean

Robin Hood gave the money to the poor. This man kept it, or lost it in a river, which is arguably worse. Even Ralph Himmelsbach, who led the FBI's hunt for years, called him a "rotten, crook."

Olivia

Okay, fair point. The Northwest still disagrees with you both, though. A tavern in Ariel, right by the search area, held a Cooper Day every November from 1974 until it closed in 2015.

Sean

A party for a hijacker. Only in America.

Olivia

And amateur detectives still haven't given up. In 2009, a group of volunteers, including a paleontologist called Tom Kaye, examined the famous tie under an electron microscope.

Sean

Please tell me they found something.

Olivia

They found tiny particles of pure titanium, which was an extremely rare material in 1971. It was used mainly in aircraft factories and a handful of specialist chemical plants.

Sean

Aircraft factories. In Seattle, in 1971, that means…

Olivia

…Boeing, most likely, or one of the companies that supplied Boeing.

Sean

So he could have been an engineer who wore that tie to work every day, and nobody at the office ever thought twice…

Olivia

…and that's the possibility that keeps people up at night.

Sean

And the FBI? I assume they quietly solved it years ago.

Olivia

In July 2016, after forty-five years, the FBI moved its resources to other priorities and stopped actively investigating. It's still the only unsolved airline hijacking on record.

Sean

Theory time, then. You go first.

Olivia

I think he survived, and I think the titanium is the answer. He was a quiet man from around Boeing who never appeared on anybody's list, and he went back to work on Monday.

Sean

With a very sore ankle.

Olivia

With a very sore ankle. And you?

Sean

I think he died that night, because he jumped into freezing rain in loafers, and nobody ever spent a single note of that money. A few bundles reached Tena Bar, and the rest is still out there in the trees.

Olivia

Says the man who's too scared to use a skydiving voucher.

Sean

Says the woman whose first source was a mail carrier.

Olivia

Okay, folks, the ballot is open. Did Cooper die in those woods, or did he walk away, and if he did, was it one of our suspects or somebody nobody has ever named? Cast your vote below.

Sean

And if you'd rather study the evidence first, every clue we mentioned is in the PDF, which is free and linked under this video.

Olivia

And subscribe to Aprendos English, because next week there's another story waiting.

Olivia

Safe travels, everyone.

Sean

And if a stranger on a plane hands you a note, read it straight away.

Want more stories at your level?

Aprendos has hundreds of podcast episodes with exercises that adapt to you.

Try Aprendos for free