The Case of the Spectacularly Incompetent D.B. Cooper Copycat Skyjackers
Those who followed Cooper’s path found it led to prison or the grave.
You have probably heard of legendary skyjacker D.B. Cooper, who hijacked Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, a Boeing 727, on November 24, 1971, and jumped from the plane’s rear air stairs with $200,000 in $20 bills, vanishing into the night, never to be seen again. But did you know that Cooper inspired more than a dozen copycat skyjackers?
It’s difficult to explain precisely how or why Cooper made such an impression on American culture. He has been the subject of books, comic books, novels, and TV shows.
In 1979, the TV show In Search of, narrated by Leonard Nimoy, described his caper as the most infamous skyjacking in American history. There is an annual convention dedicated to him called CooperCon, which has been held in Seattle since 2018.
His alias was actually Dan Cooper. A reporter got it wrong and for whatever reason the name stuck.
From December 24, 1971, to July 13, 1972, 14 men attempted to duplicate Cooper’s daring feat with varying degrees of success. One of them, Richard McCoy Jr., is believed by many to have been Cooper, and if so, was caught doing an encore performance.
How did that work out for them? Badly. Most of them never made it to the parachute out of the jetliner portion of the program. All of them were captured. One was shot and killed by an FBI agent while fleeing in a car with a hostage. Two of the hijackers were sent to mental health facilities. Prison sentences for the remaining hijackers ranged from 20 years to life, although several of them served considerably less than their original sentences.
Their demands for the release of the passengers were varied and sometimes oddly specific. Billy Hurst, Jr. demanded $2 million in ransom, parachutes, a rope, a machete, jungle boots, and a .357 magnum revolver.
Frederick Hahneman requested $303,000, six parachutes, two bush knives, two jumpsuits, cigarettes, and a helmet. Washington D.C., roommates Michael Green and Lulseged Tesfa demanded $600,000 and three parachutes. They later decided they didn’t want to jump from the airliner and requested a light airplane piloted by a man wearing only underwear so they would know he wasn’t armed.
Freefalling for Cash
Let’s look at the five skyjackers who were brave enough, prepared enough, or reckless enough to parachute out of a jetliner. Members of the two-mile high club, if you will.
Richard LaPoint
On January 20, 1972, Richard Charles LaPoint, an Army veteran and paratrooper from Boston, boarded a DC9, which, like the 727, had rear air stairs in Las Vegas. Brandishing a brown paper bag containing magnesium flares, he demanded $50,000, three parachutes, and two helmets.
After crossing the Rockies, the pilot brought the plane down to 12,000 ft (3,660 m) and dropped the airspeed to 180 mph (290 kph). LaPoint bailed out over a treeless area of northeastern Colorado. Unfortunately for him, two US Air Force F-111 fighter bombers out of Las Vegas had shadowed the plane. He was tracked down and arrested in less than three hours.
LaPoint sprained his left ankle and wrist when he landed in a wheat field and attended his arraignment in a wheelchair. On the third day of his trial for aircraft piracy, LaPoint changed his plea from not guilty to guilty and was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Richard McCoy Jr.
Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. was the best of the copycat hijackers. On April 7, 1972, he boarded United Airlines Flight 855, a Boeing 727, in Denver and took over the plane with a paperweight that resembled a hand grenade and an unloaded handgun.
McCoy wanted four parachutes and $500,000. He jumped over Provo, Utah, at about 11:30 p.m., leaving behind handwritten notes and fingerprints on a magazine he had been reading. An extensive ground search of the mud flats he landed in failed to find him.
He was arrested on April 9 at about 5:30 a.m. as he prepared to leave home to attend his Utah National Guard drill. The FBI found the ransom money minus $30 (brunch?) in his house. Authorities received a tip from a member of McCoy’s guard unit who was also a state trooper. McCoy had previously talked with him about how he would go about hijacking an airliner.
McCoy was an Army veteran, national guardsman, and helicopter pilot who served two tours of duty in Vietnam. He was a skydiver and a Sunday school teacher, and he had almost completed a law enforcement degree at Brigham Young University. He was sentenced to 45 years for air piracy.
Two years later, McCoy escaped from Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary with three other inmates by crashing a garbage truck through the main gate. Three months later, he was killed in a shootout with FBI agents in Virginia Beach.
In an interview with United Press International (UPI), McCoy was quoted as saying that he would rather go “before a firing squad or go to the gas chamber than spend the rest of my life behind bars.”
Frederick Hahneman
On May 5, 1972, Frederick William Hahneman, a Honduras-born U.S. citizen, hijacked Eastern Air Lines Flight 175 from Allentown, PA, to Miami. In addition to parachutes and gear, he demanded $303,000. Dissatisfied with the small denominations used in the ransom, he traded it in for larger bills.
After picking up the money at a refueling stop in New Orleans, Hahneman parachuted out over Honduras, where he went on the run for 28 days before finally surrendering to the U.S. Embassy on June 3, saying he had given the money to Central American revolutionaries. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Robb Heady
On June 2, 1972, Robb D. Heady, a former Army paratrooper and Vietnam veteran, hijacked United Airlines Flight 239 from Reno to San Francisco.
He boarded the plane as passengers were deplaning, wearing a pillowcase with eye slits over his head. He had a .357 revolver in one hand and a brown bag containing a parachute in his other.
He demanded $200,000 in ransom money. Because the hijacking occurred at night, FBI agents had to get the cash from two Reno casinos. Heady had to wait to transfer to another 727 as the one he boarded had one engine disabled. He became impatient and, at one point, fired a shot near a flight attendant.
Once airborne, he parachuted from 14,000 ft (4,370 m) over Washoe Lake about 20 miles (32 km) south of Reno. He was captured about five hours later. He had left $40,000 on the plane, presumably because he could not carry all of it. He lost his grip on the money bag when he pulled the ripcord, and it was recovered by FBI agents two days later. Heady was sentenced to serve 30 years.
Martin McNally
On June 23, 1972, Martin Joseph McNally, an unemployed gas station attendant, used a submachine gun to hijack an American Airlines 727 shortly after it took off from St. Louis, heading to Tulsa. He demanded $500,000.
According to John Wigger in his book, The Hijacking of American Flight 119, McNally was carrying a briefcase containing a wig, rubber gloves, a smoke grenade, and two guns: a .45 caliber Spitfire submachine gun with the stock and front grip removed and 11 inches (28 cm) cut from the barrel and a small-caliber pistol.
He instructed the pilot to fly to Toronto and bailed out over north central Indiana. McNally lost the money as he exited the plane over Peru, IN. An American Airlines bag containing $500,000 was found in a farmer’s field two days later, and the submachine gun was also found about five miles away from it.
McNally was arrested a few days later in a Detroit suburb and charged with and convicted of two counts of air piracy for which he served 37 years in prison.
The Cooper Vane
Obviously, steps had to be taken to reduce this escalating trend of skyjacking. Two technical innovations made a significant difference. You’re familiar with the first one, metal detectors, which prevent people with massive revolvers or submachine guns from boarding aircraft.
But you are probably unaware of the other, the Cooper Vane, which addressed the problem of rear air stairs on planes like the 727 and the DC9.
The Cooper vane is an ingenious device consisting of a spring-loaded paddle connected to a plate that prevents the rear air stairs from being lowered in flight. When the aircraft is on the ground, the spring keeps the paddle perpendicular to the fuselage, and the attached plate does not block the stairway.
When the plane is in flight, airflow pushes the paddle parallel to the fuselage, and the plate moves under the stairway, preventing it from being lowered. Once the plane is back on the ground, the paddle returns to its original position, allowing the air stairs to lower.
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My current substack articles include The Last Flight of the Flying Pinto, Davy Crockett Weapon System: King of the Atomic Frontier, Ice Balloon: The 1897 Expedition To The North Pole, The Peculiar Plan to Bring Wild Hippos to the USA, and of course, this article about the merry adventures of D.B. Cooper et al.
Sources
Wigger, John. 2023. The Hijacking of American Flight 119. Oxford University Press.
FBI.GOV. History: D.B. Cooper Hijacking
Wikipedia: D. B. Cooper in popular culture
Wikipedia: D. B. Cooper copycat hijackings
FBI.GOV. History: Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr.
Kitsap Sun, Bremerton, Washington, Monday, November 29, 1971, Page 9, “Hijacker’s Robin Hood Style Wins Admiration of Public”
Atlanta Constitution, Saturday, January 22, 1972, Page 2, “Hijack-Jump Suspect is Held Without Bail”
Daily Herald, Provo, UT, Tuesday, April 11, 1972, Page 1, “Where was McCoy During Hunt? Flying Around in a Helicopter”
Miami Herald, Friday, June 02, 1972, Page 80, “Honduras Hijacker Named”
Nevada State Journal, Reno, Sunday, June 04, 1972, Page 1, “Reno Man Arrested as Suspect”
Reno Gazette-Journal, Thursday, June 29, 1972, Page 1, “FBI Arrests Hijack Suspect in Detroit”
Sacramento Bee, Friday, July 07, 1972, Page 1, “GI Hijacks PSA Jetliner Near Capital, Gives Up”
Arizona Republic, Friday, July 14, 1972, Page 1, “Two Hijackers Decide to Quit.”
Images
Flickr — The U.S. Army — Jump over Mt. Rainier
