Table of Contents
727
Created Wednesday 15 July 2020
See also: Aircraft
Articles
The Rise & Fall Of The Boeing 727
The story of Boeing's narrowbody trijet.
Mark Finlay - 12 August 202
While we can thank the British for taking us into the jet age with their four-engine De Havilland Comet, Boeing firmly put its mark on jet travel when Pan American Airways introduced the Boeing 707 in 1958. The long-range jetliner can be credited with shrinking the world when it was deployed on transatlantic and transpacific routes. Yet, there remained a void in the marketplace for a jet aircraft for nearer-to-home travel.
Once the Boeing 707 program was up and running, the Seattle planemaker turned its attention to building an aircraft suitable for short to medium-range flights. The answer was a shrunken version of the 707 that could operate from shorter runways that they called the “Boeing 720”.
DB Cooper / D.B. Cooper
The Problem With The Boeing 727’s Rear Door
by Nicholas Cummins - July 14, 2020
The Boeing 727’s rear door, or otherwise described as the rear ventral airstair, could be opened mid-flight. Unlike other doors on the 727, there was no mechanical preventative stopping the rear door being opened while in flight and, say, a passenger jumping from the plane. This very scenario famously occurred with the D.B. Cooper Hijacking back in 1971.
DB Cooper Case Could Close Soon Thanks To Particle Evidence
Kristina Panos - January 23, 2024
It’s one of the strangest unsolved cases, and even though the FBI closed their investigation back in 2016, this may be the year it cracks wide open. On November 24, 1971, Dan Cooper, who would become known as DB Cooper due to a mistake by the media, skyjacked a Boeing 727 — Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 — headed from Portland to Seattle.
During the flight, mild-mannered Cooper coolly notified a flight attendant sitting behind him via neatly-handwritten note that he had a bomb in his briefcase. His demands were a sum of $200,000 (about $1.5 M today) and four parachutes once they got to Seattle. Upon landing, Cooper released the passengers and demanded that the plane be refueled and pointed toward Mexico City with him and most of the original crew aboard. But around 30 minutes into the flight, Cooper opened the plane’s aft staircase and vanished, parachuting into the night sky.
In the investigation that followed, the FBI recovered Cooper’s clip-on tie, tie clip, and two of the four parachutes. While it’s unclear why Cooper would have left the tie behind, it has become the biggest source of evidence for identifying him. New evidence shows that a previously unidentified particle on the tie has been identified as “titanium smeared with stainless steel”.
https://hackaday.com/2024/01/23/db-cooper-case-could-close-soon-thanks-to-particle-evidence/
Is There New Evidence in the D.B. Cooper Case?
Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday November 24, 2024 10:34AM
On November 24th, 1971 — 53 years ago today — a mysterious man jumped out of an airplane clutching $200,000 in ransom money. (He'd extorted it from the airline by claiming he had a bomb, and it's still “the only unsolved case of air piracy in the history of commercial aviation,” according to Wikipedia.) Will modern technology finally let us solve the case — or just turn it into a miniseries on Netflix? And have online researchers finally discovered the definitive clue?
The FBI vetted more than 800 suspects, according to the Wyoming news site Cowboy State Daily, but in 2016 announced they were suspending their active investigation.
So it's newsworthy that the FBI now appears to be investigating new evidence, according to an amateur D.B. Cooper researcher on YouTube: the discovery of what's believed to be D.B. Cooper's uniquely-modified parachute:
Retired pilot, skydiver and YouTuber, Dan Gryder told Cowboy State Daily that he may have found the missing link after uncovering the modified military surplus bailout rig he believes was used by D.B. Cooper in the heist. It belonged to Richard Floyd McCoy II, and was carefully stored in his deceased mother's storage stash until very recently… McCoy's children, Chanté and Richard III, or “Rick,” agree with Gryder that they believe their father was D.B. Cooper, a secret that shrouded the family but wasn't overtly discussed. For years, they said, the family stayed mum out of fear of implicating their mother, Karen, whom they believe was complicit in both hijackings. Upon her death in 2020, they broke their silence to Gryder after being contacted by him off and on for years.
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/11/24/1815217/is-there-new-evidence-in-the-db-cooper-case