The Diane Rehm Show

LOL. Compared pictues AND they do look a lot alike.

Needed laugh. Back to reality now.

This author has been speaking for 5 minutes and already there is SO much wrong with his story: he is clearly making things up for drama! Some examples:

1. The flight attendant did not "freak out." She was remarkably calm throughout.
2. Airplanes do NOT have a "starboard" side. If he thinks they do, he hasn't done any research about airplanes.
3. How do they know about the necktie? He didn't answer Diane's question here at all! (Instead he bragged about his "research" in the FBI files.) They know because he left it behind, in the aircraft!
4. The second flight attendant did not call the cockpit when the aircraft was at 80 or 90 knots! Flight attendants at Northwest were trained not to contact the cockpit during critical phases of flight. She waited until the aircraft was airborne (not at 90 knots!) then called the cockpit (although it was still early enough to violate the rule).
5. Perhaps most flagrantly, he seems to think the hijacker mysteriously was absent when the plane landed. In fact, the crew knew exactly when the rear stair door opened and when he left, because panel lights lit and the airplane handling characteristics changed.

And so on....

Clearly, this author looked at an FBI file (which, as anyone familiar with them knows, are full of hearsay), but didn't do any other real research.

Wrong again! There were THREE pilots in the cockpit. The flight engineer is a pilot. And all 727s have aft stairs, which, thanks to a modification, can no longer be opened in flight.

as soon as he jumped out of that plane the pilot would've got a latitude and a longitude coordinate. sounds like that never happened. which means the entire flight staff was in on it. I SOLVED THAT CRIME FOR YA. now listen. that would've never happened today because they would've scrambled me a couple of f-22 raptors sugar.

"now listen. that would've never happened today because they would've scrambled me a couple of f-22 raptors sugar."
Brilliant! Plus the little thing of getting a "bomb" in a suitcase (real or imagined) through security.

Robert - I don't know how far back your experience as a sport parachutist goes, but at the time of this hijacking many sport parachute rigs were nothing more than modified military canopies, or "factory" rigs that were little more than copies of modified military canopies. "Square" canopies were just coming onto the market, if that's what you are meaning when referring to a "sport canopy." Not very many people had jumped them, and early square canopies like the "cloud" were pretty crude by today's standards.

On the contrary, a round military canopy may well have been preferable to a square sport canopy, and probably even to a modified military canopy. Jumping into the piney green, in the dark, is a crap shoot any way that you look at it, but you're probably safer doing it with the least amount of forward drive possible. That would allow you to penetrate the trees coming straight down, rather than driving into them. Plus, the standard round military canopies are ridiculously reliable when it comes to deploying them. I don't know that I've ever seen specifically what type of rigs were provided to Cooper, but I think I'd rather ride a T-10 into the dark forest than a small ram-air rig. Unless you have the bad luck of draping the canopy right over top a tree (which would be visible), the chances are that you'd just crash through the evergreen branches and end up on the ground with little more than scratches.

Likewise, the comment that Cooper probably wasn't military because he didn't know how to deploy the aft stairwell strikes me as bogus. On military jumps it would be up to the flight crew to deploy that, and not the troops jumping the ship.