This thing?:
Where do you exit that doesn't entail getting sucked into the engines?
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 ...
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
July 1980. One of them may have been me!
There is no such thing a "perfectly good airplane" there is just ones that have not crashed yet. :)
This would have been about 15 years earlier, so probably not. You’d have been what? 3 or 4 at the time?
;-)
Actually I was just a bit shy of thirty.
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.
This thing?:
Where do you exit that doesn't entail getting sucked into the engines?
the Air Force C-140.
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.
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.
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?
Sorry, I mis spoke. Starlifter.
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.
The DNA didn’t match.
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