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How the hunt for D.B. Cooper made an aging Vietnam veteran the target of TV sleuths
W Post ^ | 27 July 2016 | Ian Shapira

Posted on 07/27/2016 12:19:14 PM PDT by DUMBGRUNT

They were certain they knew the identity of the long-missing hijacker known as D.B. Cooper, and now the self-appointed investigators wanted their man to turn himself in to the FBI and sign over his life rights for a book and movie project...

Rackstraw watched the documentary, he said in an interview.

He watched himself being ambushed. He watched the man whose son found the ransom money along the Columbia River deny that it had been planted there. He watched a Northwest Orient flight attendant examine an old photo of him and his decades-old NBC interview and repeatedly say she didn’t think he was the hijacker. He watched Curtis Eng, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the Cooper investigation, say he wasn’t convinced that Colbert’s team had cracked the case.

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Chit/Chat; Conspiracy
KEYWORDS: aviation; brianingram; calaverascounty; california; dbcooper; hijacking; manhunt; missing; robertrackstraw; sandiego; stockton; theft
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To: DUMBGRUNT

Thanks for the info. I remember the Black Hats told us you don’t jump from a C140. You stand about 5 feet back and when the jump master tells you to one just walks toward the door. You get sucked out. I can see how jumping from a rear stair it would be different as you would go into the relatively protected air behind the plane.


21 posted on 07/27/2016 1:04:50 PM PDT by wastoute (Government cannot redistribute wealth. Government can only redistribute poverty.)
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To: wastoute

One detective at the time said that D.B. jumping from that center exit door “would have gone ass over teakettle the instant he hit the windstream and probably plummeted to earth wound up like a ball in his chute”.


22 posted on 07/27/2016 1:07:13 PM PDT by elcid1970 ("The Second Amendment is more important than Islam. Buy ammo.")
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To: DUMBGRUNT

Old D B made a clean getaway. No sir, they’ll never catch D B Cooper or will they admit that the money was laundered to buy gold.


23 posted on 07/27/2016 1:14:42 PM PDT by Karl Spooner
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To: carriage_hill

My dad was an Army pilot, and that was very much his attitude. And he flew an aircraft that people did parachute out of from time to time, at least in training, the Caribou.


24 posted on 07/27/2016 1:17:03 PM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: wastoute

Ha! I can well believe that. I used to watch the trainees from the car window as a kid, as we went around the perimeter of the jump tower fields when we were on post. It didn’t look like fun, as everyone ran from one location to another at doubletime in those old school green fatigues in the GA heat and humidity. Those fatigues looked black from being so sweat soaked.


25 posted on 07/27/2016 1:23:00 PM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: FreedomPoster

July 1980. One of them may have been me!


26 posted on 07/27/2016 1:26:05 PM PDT by wastoute (Government cannot redistribute wealth. Government can only redistribute poverty.)
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To: carriage_hill
Personally, I never saw any reason to jump out of a perfectly good airplane.

There is no such thing a "perfectly good airplane" there is just ones that have not crashed yet. :)

27 posted on 07/27/2016 1:26:11 PM PDT by Harmless Teddy Bear (Proud Infidel, Gun Nut, Religious Fanatic and Freedom Fiend)
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To: wastoute

This would have been about 15 years earlier, so probably not. You’d have been what? 3 or 4 at the time?

;-)


28 posted on 07/27/2016 1:30:25 PM PDT by FreedomPoster (Islam delenda est)
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To: FreedomPoster

Actually I was just a bit shy of thirty.


29 posted on 07/27/2016 1:39:20 PM PDT by wastoute (Government cannot redistribute wealth. Government can only redistribute poverty.)
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To: Harmless Teddy Bear

I had 42hrs in my log book toward a license, when my instructor’s son and family died in their C-172, the same plane I was training in. Hit a power wire on approach to a small rural airport. I didn’t log anymore hours after that, in ‘80. I quit flying commercially in ‘96, after TWA 800. If I can’t get there by driving, I don’t need to go there. Heh.


30 posted on 07/27/2016 1:41:58 PM PDT by Carriage Hill ( Peace is that brief glorious moment in history, when everybody stands around reloading.)
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To: wastoute
"When I went to jump school I did one jump from a C-140."

This thing?:

Where do you exit that doesn't entail getting sucked into the engines?

31 posted on 07/27/2016 1:46:41 PM PDT by PLMerite (Compromise is Surrender: The Revolution...will not be kind.)
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To: PLMerite

the Air Force C-140.


32 posted on 07/27/2016 2:13:26 PM PDT by wastoute (Government cannot redistribute wealth. Government can only redistribute poverty.)
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To: wastoute
I believe it was an old 727, no duh, of course, since the event was fifty-five years ago. I flew on one airline's inaugural flight of the model in 1964, and the pilots took it up to 43,000' And after intercepting the take off on a Lockheed Electra, the contrast was future shock. The experience made an impression.

I don't think the airlines made it a standard practice.

Regardless.. the 727-100, IIRC, was quite capable of what might seem to be near stall speeds under the conditions recorded.

The documentary was not completely useless, even to many of us who hashed and rehashed the Cooper hijacking over and over to near exhaustion years before the Whirled-White Web. It summed up the various threads, though the producers felt the need to hype some new and definitive revelation going into and out of each commercial break.

Aside from that, some actual critical thinking was applied by their experts, including their final two investigators, who, in the end, failed to seal the deal.

The producers filmed those Los Angeles investigators as they "ambushed" Robert Rackstraw.

The more compelling case reviewed was probably that of L.D. Cooper. Unfortunately, his niece seemed to be angling for a guest slot on Coast-to-Coast.

Rackstraw probably has a case, though he should have denied it outright when he was similarly ambushed by reporters decades ago, requiring the F.B.I. to rule him out for reasons they can't disclose.

The producers should have reviewed the technical aspects of the hijacking, though they did show that there was more than a few vets who could and still could bail successfully from a partially deployed rear stairs of a 727-100 from the lowest altitudes, that is below that aircrafts accepted range.

33 posted on 07/27/2016 2:42:59 PM PDT by Prospero (Lex est rex)
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To: wastoute

That IS a drawing of a C-140. A failure as a corporate jet because the 4 rear engines gulped the fuel. Got the taxpayers to buy some so the generals could travel in comfort, and a few were modified for actual working duties.

Built at the Lockheed plant in Georgia in a small building off to the side of the main assembly building.

I call your bluff. No way someone could parachute out of that 10 passenger jet without hitting the wing or the engines.


34 posted on 07/27/2016 2:58:23 PM PDT by PAR35
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To: wastoute; PLMerite

Maybe you mean a C-130 Hercules, the classic straight high mounted wing four engine turboprop?

Or a C-141 Starlifter, the swept wing four engine turbojet about the size of a large airliner?


35 posted on 07/27/2016 3:22:23 PM PDT by OA5599
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To: PAR35

Sorry, I mis spoke. Starlifter.


36 posted on 07/27/2016 4:23:57 PM PDT by wastoute (Government cannot redistribute wealth. Government can only redistribute poverty.)
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To: wastoute

Good workhorse of a plane. In service for about 40 years.

It was built in the big building (the old Bell B-29 facility) that was later used for the C-5 program.


37 posted on 07/27/2016 5:06:46 PM PDT by PAR35
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To: longfellow

The DNA didn’t match.


38 posted on 02/04/2018 12:14:06 AM PST by SunkenCiv (www.tapatalk.com/groups/godsgravesglyphs/, forum.darwincentral.org, www.gopbriefingroom.com)
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