I feel a little guilty posting this over from DZ, but here goes - by Flyjack.
FLYJACK
Found this, very interesting though some errors (assumptions)..
"On the night of 24 November 1971 a man who became known as D. B. Cooper boarded a Northwest Airlines 727 in Portland OR and then demanded $200,000 in cash and five parachutes, ransom money, and crews to open the back door and he parachuted out of the Seattle-bound plane with the ransom money. He was never found, nor was any validated evidence of him. Beginning in ca. 2000 a youth reportedly found scraps of the marked ransom money along the Columbia River near Vancouver WA. Other reports spotted fragments of his parachute; this has been repudiated.
The 190th FIS scrambled two armed F-102A interceptors to shadow the hijacked plane, but the hijacker's cleverness and the nighttime conditions prevented very close observation of the airliner. 190th Pilot Major Gene Winchester recalls the incident and his story in this chapter reveals how carefully planned and executed was 'Cooper's Caper'. In October, the 190th alert crews were called on to assist in what has become known as the D B Cooper Affair. Lee Bernasconi was the 190th's Alert Detachment Commander at the time, and when I asked him about it and who was on alert when it happened, he replied, "Ahh, Winchester ... and I can't remember who else was on that night, Thanksgiving night, or maybe the Friday after Thanksgiving. [Laughing]
I was at my home on Cole and Victory, and the phone rings, and two airplanes takeoff. I said, "That's my alert birds!" My home was at Cole and Victory. I said, "Hey, that's my alert birds! What's going on?" They [the night crew in the CAC] said they didn't know—so that's about all I knew. And our interceptors got over there and got generally behind him, but they didn't get there until after he crossed the Columbia River, and I think Cooper was already gone by then. And they followed him for a ways, and finally went in ... refueled, and came home. They didn't have radio contact with the airliner, and... probably stayed two miles back most of the time
Gene Winchester remembers that Thanksgiving very well when he and Jack Newland were on alert, and at about 4:50 p.m. "... we got a telephone call saying there was a hijacking taking place, and they were airborne at the time and ... they told us to stand by. And then I guess they landed at Seattle first, and picked up the money and four parachutes and ... then they went over to Portland and landed again and let some of the passengers off.
They called us and said this guy has commandeered the plane, and he's got the chutes and the money, and he's at Portland and ... ''what we want you to do is be at Portland in the traffic pattern—don't get too close that you'll bother him or startle him—but we'll put you on him in trail' and they figured he's going to bail out somewhere and so you just follow him, and don't get too close to scare him. The thing was, they told us 'when he bails out the commercial pilot would turn all his lights back on bright flash', and we would fly a triangle pattern to mark this spot on the radar. That was our briefing.
"So Jack Newland and I took off and ... watched him take off from Portland and we snuck in to ... about a mile in trail—and it was a little difficult, he was only going 150. And he was staying about 10,000 feet." Recalling his previous cargo plane flying days, Winchester figured "... he'd maintain that altitude and airspeed as a safety factor because if he bailed out at a higher velocity... I had a little trouble keeping flying, so I'd get up on the perch and when I was about to stall, I'd go over and sit on the other side. And the lights never came on—the 'bright- flash' signal—when he jumped out. And I was told that he had displayed a weapon and told the crew to shut the cabin door. So they never knew exactly when he bailed out, that's why they didn't turn the lights on."
Winchester continues, "So, evidently he went out there, and we had no way of knowing, and we followed that airliner to Reno—Jack and I, it was Thanksgiving evening, I remember that. We were worried about getting home for Thanksgiving dinner! But our briefing was 'he was going to land at Reno and refuel, and we don't want you to land on the same base with him', so we went over to Hamilton, I believe it was, and they would call us when he took off. I watched him land and that back door of that airplane was dragging on the runway and shooting sparks like—you know when you put a knife on the grinder?!It looked like the sparks was going 50 feet in the air!
It's dark, and we probably.... got up there about somewhere around 6 o'clock—it was VFR, it was great—a clear night and we could see other airplanes ... and there were a couple F-106s out of McChord, they came down and were available for a while, then they went back. And we asked Maj Gene Winchester 'What are our instructions?' They said 'Well, we don't know if he's still on the airplane, or if he went out the back door when it stopped, he might be here, we 're going to make a cordon, a perimeter off, and do a ground search... And you go over there and get out of the way and fill up 'cause we think he might be going to Mexico; you might be following him to Mexico And I thought 'That sounds interesting!'
So we sit over there for, I don't know, several hours. And then they called us and said 'you could go home'. We got back here about 7:00 a.m., Jack and I."1 Winchester had no direct radio contact with the airline crew, only with FAA Controllers. In the darkness and following in-trail at a safe distance, they never saw Cooper leave the airliner."
Edited 1 hour ago by FLYJACK
Edited into paragraphs by Ggr.
