From Netflix and the director of The Way Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin comes D. B. Cooper: Where Are You?! This documentary series directed by Marina Zenovich. In 1971, a skyjacker parachutes off a plane with a bag of stolen cash — and gets away with it. Decades later, his identity remains a compelling mystery.
On the afternoon of November 24, 1971, an unidentified man hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727 aircraft operated by Northwest Orient Airlines, in United States airspace. The aircraft was flying from Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, Washington. The hijacker extorted $200,000 in ransom (equivalent to $1,338,000 in 2021), asked to be flown to Mexico City, then parachuted to an uncertain fate over southwestern Washington part-way through the second flight. In 1980, a small portion of the ransom was found along the banks of the Columbia River, which triggered renewed interest but ultimately only deepened the mystery; the great majority of the ransom remains unrecovered. The man purchased his airline ticket using the alias Dan Cooper but, because of a news miscommunication, became known in popular culture as D. B. Cooper. For forty-five years after the hijacking, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) maintained an active investigation. Despite compiling an extensive case file over that period, no definitive conclusions were reached regarding Cooper's true identity or fate. The crime remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in commercial aviation history. Numerous theories of widely varying plausibility have been proposed over the years by investigators, reporters, and amateur enthusiasts. The FBI's best guess is that Cooper did not survive the jump, for several reasons: the rainy and dangerous conditions for skydiving on the night of the hijacking; Cooper's lack of proper equipment; the landing area being a wilderness; the apparent lack of detailed knowledge Cooper had of his landing area; and the rest of the ransom money never turning up even after decades, suggesting it was never spent. In July 2016, the FBI officially suspended active investigation of the case.The hijacking had major implications for commercial aviation and airport security. Cooper's brazen hijacking, and a slew of Cooper imitators in the following year, caused security procedure to become stricter. Metal detectors and compulsory searching of baggage became standard, and paying for flights the same day of their departure with cash became a cause for scrutiny. Aircraft design was modified with Cooper vanes that would prevent the aft staircase from being lowered while in flight. By 1973, the pace of hijackings greatly slowed as the new security measures successfully dissuaded would-be hijackers whose motive was only money.
A fascinating true-crime documentary series that is as perplexing in its mystery as it is entertaining in its execution. However, by turning this narrative into a search for an identification that seems increasingly unlikely to ever happen, Zenovich loses focus, and we become just as lost as the hundreds of people convinced they know what happened to D.B. Cooper.
Simon says D. B. Cooper: Where Are You?! receives:
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