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Ransom Skyjacks Wash-Landing'A second attempt to emulate the feat of the briefly celebrated “D. B. Cooper — skyjacking a plane and escaping with the ransom by parachute has been thwarted.The hijacker of a Hughes Airwest DC-9 in Las Vegas was given a “bugged parachute whose signals were followed by Air Force jets trailing the airliner. He was picked up a mile from where he landed.In the other episode, which took place onChristmas Eve, the hijacker of a Northwest Orient707 never got that far. While he waited in the plane atChicago’s 0 Hare Airport for delivery of $300,000 ransom and parachutes, the crew escaped. Deprivedof his hostages, he gave up.The first and only successful parachute escape by a skyjacker was carried out on the evening before Thanksgiving by someone who later wrote letters to several newspapers under the name “D. B. Cooper.” This involved another Northwest plane, and $200,000 ransom.Because of the daring and novelty of the robbery, the hijacker was immediately called a Robin Hood (though in his letter “Cooper disavowed being any such thing and no poor people have yet reported receiving any share of his loot).“We all like adventure stories, explained a professor of sociology at the University of Washington. “That hijacker took the greatest ultimate risk. He showed real heroic features mystery, drama, romanticism, a high degree of skill and all the necessities for the perfect crime.“This was neither political nor neurotic. His motive was simply $200,000 and people can understand that much better.”Strip away the “drama and “romanticism, however, and what you have is a man who threatened to blow up an airplane and everyone in it if he didn’t get his way.Suppose his bluff had been called. He would either have had to go through with it and commit mass murder and suicide (had he really carried a bomb) or else sit down in a corner like a chastized schoolboy and wait to be taken into custody, as did the frustrated hijacker in Chicago. In either case,some hero.It is to be hoped that the failure of his two would-be imitators would get the message acrossthat this particular ploy works only once and we will see no more of this supposedly “romantic” style of skyjacker.
Newspaper Details
Cambridge Daily Jeffersonian
Cambridge, Ohio, US
Fri, Jan 28, 1972
Page 4
Full Page
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Anonymous
WV, USA 05 May 2020
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