Shutter,
Given that it appears the debris from yesterday’s incident fell straight down underneath the flight path, what would account for the insistence that the Hicks placard floated several miles off 305s flight path? Yesterday had the same altitude, same wind speed, same wind direction. So what would account for the miles deviation of the Hicks placard? Just it’s weight?
Shutter, permit me to inject something here. Nothing from an airliner that is doing at least 200+ MPH falls straight down. Everything has an initial forward motion along the flight path, but the heavier objects will continue further along that path than the lighter objects which will slow down much faster. Things such as the Cooper placard will slow down almost instantly. But in short order, everything is moving vertically with respect to the air mass and subject to the winds aloft.
The heavier objects will be on the ground first and the lighter objects will take longer and thus will drift horizontally much further. In sky diving, a no-pull skydiver falling head first from 10,000 feet will be on the ground in about 40 seconds. If he is in a stable spread, it will take about 60 seconds. If he is under canopy from 10,000 feet, the descent rate will be about 1200 feet per minute and he will be on the ground in about 8 minutes.
So I assume experiments have been done other than the one determining that the noise they heard was verified to be him leaping from the stairs? So accounting for the wind speed and direction that night, (I do not know how accurate weather report on winds and such were in 1971?), and his weight and all, they should have done a simulation with both scenario's. The chute deployed and the chute not. But it seems pretty obvious that he did make it, deploy the chute, because if he had simply crashed to his demise, SOMETHING WOULD HAVE BEEN FOUND. How many are still alive that were in the cock pit? I know the captain passed away a long time ago. And I know Bruce said that one guy changes his story often? They really must come up with an accurate course in the Victor 23 path. I have heard the reports that they are unsure of the course taken? Even with very high winds as they say there were that night, how far would something that heavy drift?
It would be good to try and do a simulation with weather conditions that were as similar as possible to that night. I know that is not easy
I believe both William Rataczak and Harald Anderson are still alive and both were interviewed in a recent TV program on the hijacking. The problem with these TV interviews is that the right questions don't get asked and the result is they are not very informative.
The weather stories put out by Captain Bohan and others do not agree with the actual measured weather for the night of the hijacking. Bohan claims to have had an 80 Knot headwind from the southeast on his flight between SEATAC and Portland and about a 30 knot crosswind component when landing to the southeast at Portland. There were no 80 Knot winds aloft in the Seattle/Portland area that evening and the actual measured ground wind at Portland for the day of the hijacking never exceeded about 10 Knots. Bohan's claims can be ignored.
Thanks to Tom Kaye's efforts, the hourly weather sequence reports and the forecast winds aloft for the entire Pacific Northwest area have long been available for the time of the hijacking. Kaye also recently came up with the measured winds aloft for the time of the hijacking. All of this information is probably posted somewhere on one of Shutter's sites.
The measured winds aloft were slightly higher than the forecast winds aloft but never exceeded about 35 Knots from the southwest for 10,000 feet above sea level and lower altitudes. The weather at Portland for the time the hijacked airliner was passing through was always described as light rain and good visibility with several cloud layers and a complete overcast at 5000 feet. The sea level barometric pressure was above standard (29.92 in.Hg.) and increasing from Seattle south and that means the weather was improving the further south the airliner flew.
There seems to be some misconceptions about the airliner being far off the V-23 airway. For what is now called the Western Flight Path, the airliner was never more than 3 or 4 miles from V-23 and that was only for a very brief time as it bypassed Portland on the west side. All of the Western Flight Path is in controlled airspace and it was while on that flight path that the T-33, F-102s, and F-106s were initially vectored to intercept the airliner.
The WFP passes about 1000 feet west of Tina Bar and the airliner basically flew over the Columbia River for about 10 miles as it was passing Tina Bar. If Cooper was a no-pull and jumped while in the Tina Bar area, he would have landed on the east side of the Columbia River and west of the Northwest Lower River Road. The money could never have made it to Tina Bar if he had landed on the east side of the Northwest Lower River Road. This had been discussed at length over the years.
As a no-pull, Cooper would be a very difficult figure to locate in the brush and wooded area along the east bank of the Columbia River. There are many, many instances of searches that could not find extremely large objects in such terrain.
