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AN air traffic controller who supervised the flight hijacked by DB Cooper has shared potentially key information he believes may have been overlooked by the FBI in their initial search for the infamous crook.
Cliff Ammerman was just two years into his career with the FAA when Northwest Orient Flight 305 was hijacked by a non-descript middle-aged man identifying himself as Dan Cooper on November 24, 1971.
Cooper hijacked the Boeing 727 during what was meant to be a short 35-minute flight from Portland to Seattle on the eve of Thanksgiving.
The mild-mannered man passed a note to a flight attendant informing her he had a bomb in his briefcase and outlined his demands to spare the lives of the 36 other passengers on board: $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills and four parachutes.
When the flight landed in Seattle the exchange was made. All the passengers – none the wiser to the situation – and some crew were permitted to deplane.
Under Cooper’s instructions, Flight 305 was refueled and ordered to take off for a second time in the direction of Mexico City at a low altitude of 10,000ft and the minimum airspeed possible without stalling the aircraft.
Ammerman had just returned from his lunch break when he was informed by a colleague he would be supervising a “hijacked aircraft pretty soon” once it crossed over into Woodland, Washington.
“That was the first I heard about it,” remembered Ammerman, 81, in an interview with The U.S. Sun.
“We didn’t know much about what was happening onboard because we weren’t getting a lot of knowledge from the pilot. They were busy in the cockpit communicating with the company and other people on the ground.
“Also, you have to assume the hijacker is in the cockpit […] so we were being really careful with everything we transmitted.”
Ammerman said he had no idea the hijacker claimed to have a bomb onboard.
He was, however, aware of the ransom fee paid out and the number of parachutes Cooper had requested.
Ammerman said he was worried that the hijacker was going to make the crew bail out of the aircraft with him, leaving the 727 to crash to the ground unmanned.
The controller’s fears would prove unfounded; somewhere over southwest Washington, a little after 8pm, Cooper parachuted from the plane via the aircraft’s rear staircase, leaving nothing behind but a clip-on tie and a handful of cigarette butts.
Ammerman continued to assist Flight 305 up until it passed over Eugene, Oregon. It later landed safely in Reno, Nevada, some seven hours after the terrifying ordeal began.
Despite a massive search, Dan Cooper was never found. (He’d later become known as DB Cooper when a journalist at the time accidentally mistyped Dan as DB in a report and the name stuck).
Where he landed, and whether or not he even survived the jump, has also never been determined.
The FBI considered more than 800 potential suspects in the five years after the heist, though failed to find any evidence to determine a conclusive match.
The only trace of Cooper ever yielded came in 1980 when a child digging along the banks of the Columbia River in Tena Bar, north of Portland, unearthed stacks of rotting $20 bills totaling $5,800.
Further investigation linked the bills back to Cooper’s ransom.
The FBI published the bills’ serial numbers in the hope of fresh leads, but the vast majority of the cash was never recovered.
Cooper’s trail went cold again and the case has continued to baffle law enforcement and amateur detectives alike in the years since.
Today, the hijacking of Northwest 305 remains the only unsolved skyjacking in U.S. history. The FBI closed its investigation into DB Cooper for good in 2016.
Ammerman was never interviewed by the Bureau.
He believes the FBI may have overlooked a few key details in their initial investigation, including a strange incident he was alerted to near Eugene, Oregon, the night before the skyjacking.
“They didn’t contact me, but the only thing I thought the FBI should know […] was something that happened the night before the hijacking that may have been pertinent,” he said.
“I was working another swing shift and late in the evening, sometime around 10pm or 10:30pm, someone from the Eugene [air traffic control] tower called and said there’s someone from an airplane dropping flares down by Cottage Grove, which is a community southeast of Eugene.
“He asked me if I’d heard anything about it and I hadn’t. So I checked the NOTAMs [Notice to Airmen] to see if anything was mentioned and there was nothing there.
“But after that hijacking happened I thought to myself, ‘if this guy’s got someone on the ground waiting for him in a certain area, what better way to see a guy coming down than if he was using a flare?'”
They didn’t contact me, but the only thing I thought the FBI should know […] was something that happened the night before the hijacking that may have been pertinent.
Cliff Ammerman
When Cooper first hijacked Flight 305, he opened his briefcase and showed the flight attendant what she later described as a tangle of wires and two rows of four red cylinders – which she assumed was dynamite – attached to a battery.
However, Ammerman believes that perhaps those red sticks were actually flares fashioned to look like explosives.
And the incident over Eugene the night prior may have been Cooper conducting a test run for his jump.
He explained: “My thought was if they’re going to practice their getaway they’re not going to do it where they were going to jump out.
“I made sure my supervisor contacted the FBI the next day and let them know about the incident but I never got any feedback from them.
“So I just assumed they checked it out and nothing came from it.”
FLIGHT PATH CONFUSION
The FBI long believed that whoever DB Cooper was he was familiar with the area in which the hijacking was staged.
The subject of whether Cooper could’ve survived his perilous jump has been fiercely contested for decades.
If he did, the FBI forecasted he likely jumped somewhere near the town of La Center, Washington.
The prediction was made using the Bureau’s estimated flight path for Northwest 305 and testimony from the pilots who reported feeling a change in pressure on the aircraft at around 8.13pm.
However, numerous independent investigators believe the Bureau miscalculated Flight 305’s path.
Among them is Eric Ulis, who told The U.S. Sun last month that – after meticulously analyzing wind speeds, “free fall” data, and other information – he believes the FBI accidentally mapped the flight path of one of the military jets scrambled to follow the plane, which was also being advised by Ammerman.
Ulis believes Cooper instead landed on Bachelor’s Island along the Columbia River, north of where his stash of money was found in 1980.
Ammerman agrees with Ulis that the FBI’s flight path data may not strictly be accurate.
He also stated that the change in air pressure reported by the crew in the cockpit may not be a reliable way to determine Cooper’s jump time.
“There was some really crummy weather that night so there was not a lot of traffic in the sky,” Ammerman said.
“The pilot was deviating off the centerline [of his designated flight path, Victor-23], likely to avoid weather cells that he would see, but I also found out later from one of the stewardesses that when he flew over areas like Vancouver and Portland, he was trying to avoid areas that were lit up.
“And the reason he was doing that was because he didn’t want that airplane blowing up and debris falling down on a city.”
Compounding the mystery, Ammerman added, is that it’s not known precisely when Cooper jumped.
“We don’t even know if he even went out of the airplane when the FBI thinks he did.
“Their thinking is he walking down the rear stairs and then jumped, which caused the stairs to hammer against the back due to the wind force, giving them a pressure bump inside the airplane.
“I’ve talked to people who used to fly C-141s [a military cargo plane], and they worked lots of missions dropping cargo and paratroopers, and they said you will always get pressure bumps on that aircraft with the back open.
“Flight 305 had the rear exit open until it landed in Reno. They probably had several pressure bumps during the course of the flight, so I’m not so sure he even jumped out when they think he did – that’s another mystery.”
BOEING ENGINEER OR FORMER SPY?
Ammerman doesn’t believe the case of DB Cooper will ever be solved.
However, he does believe the hijacker had a detailed understanding of Boeing 727s and how they operated, hinting that he may have previously worked for the airplane manufacturer or was potentially ex-military.
Evidencing his belief is a series of covert military operations conducted by the U.S. Government during the Vietnam War that involved 727s.
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The point of the tests – which were successful – was to determine whether the aircraft could be used for clandestine air drops – including cargo and jumpers – by modifying their built-in rear air stairs with a trough.
Cooper lowered the rear staircase of Northwest 305 himself before jumping and was very detailed in his instructions for how the aircraft should be flown: gear down, wing flaps at 15 degrees, and flying no higher than 10,000 feet with a de-pressured passenger cabin.
“He knew that it could fly with the stairs down at a slow speed and have the gear and the flaps set at the positions they were and so it makes you wonder if he didn’t have something to do with either Boeing testing that or the Air Force doing the jumps,” said Ammerman.
“Because I do understand that the Air Force during the Vietnam era did drop spies into North Vietnam with that airplane, walking down that rear stairway, and of course at the time that was classified.
“It makes me think that there was some knowledge there that he had of that.
“Where it came from, I’m not sure, but you would think it was either from Boeing or being one of those people in the Air Force who were a part of the mission.”
THE LATEST SUSPECT
Regardless of who DB Cooper was, Ammerman rejects any romanticization of him being some kind of folk hero.
He was a criminal, he said, who put a lot of lives in danger on that fateful November night – lives that were irrevocably changed as a result.
While Ammerman is pessimistic that Cooper will ever be unmasked, investigator Eric Ulis is confident he’ll solve the case by 2030.
The newest suspect in his sights is a man named Vince Petersen, a former engineer at a titanium plant in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, which served as a Boeing subcontractor.
Petersen, who died in 2002, would’ve been 52 at the time of the skyjacking.
Ulis first identified Petersen as a potential suspect in late 2022 after analyzing a spreadsheet of microscopic evidence garnered from Cooper’s clip-on tie.
Several particles identified on the tie were determined to be consistent with specialty metals from the aerospace sector, including titanium, high-grade stainless steel, aluminum, and some rare elements, Ulis says.
He painstakingly went through a spreadsheet of more than 100,000 particles yielded from the tie in search of anything that seemed out of the ordinary.
Ulis explained: “My thought was that perhaps I could find something tantamount to commercial DNA, that I could find something that pointed to a specific company, something rare or a unique particle, just as DNA points to a specific individual.
“And indeed, I find three particles of a very rare alloy of titanium and antimony that have a very specific balance, a very specific blend.
“Why that’s important is because I paired that alloy up with a United States patent that was granted to a Boeing subcontractor based in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, which is no longer around.
“But I think the science clearly suggests that DB Cooper came from this subcontractor, and that has enabled me to do a follow-up investigation and interviews and that type of thing to ultimately zero in on one particular person of interest who’s no longer alive that perhaps was DB Cooper.”
He knew that it could fly with the stairs down at a slow speed and have the gear and the flaps set at the positions they were and so it makes you wonder if he didn’t have something to do with either Boeing […] or the Air Force.
Cliff Ammermen
Only eight other men worked at the same titanium plant as Peterson.
Ulis spoke to a former supervisor at the plant and began describing Cooper’s physical attributes, telling him he was looking for a man between the ages of 45-50, clean-cut, conservative, with a high forehead and roughly six foot one, and the supervisor apparently responded immediately, “That sounds like Vince Petersen.”
“So, I started looking into Vince Petersen from there,” continued Ulis. “Vince Petersen would’ve been 52 at the time of the skyjacking, around the right age, and his height makes him an anomaly for the time – that’s pretty tall for a guy born around 1920.
“I also asked the supervisor about traveling to Seattle. He confirmed he would travel to Seattle, as well as to visit other contractors like Lockheed or General Dynamics, and there was one other person that he traveled with on these trips occasionally – and that was Vince Petersen.
“So now, we can place Vince Petersen in Seattle, at Boeing, with the supervisor during the 1960s, possibly into the ’70s. But the ’60s is most important because that’s when the 727 that Cooper hijacked was being developed.
“It obviously doesn’t prove that Vince Petersen was DB Cooper, but it’s certainly intriguing as far as everything else goes, as we know he had access to the titanium and antimony particles that were found on Cooper’s tie.”
He took his findings to Petersen’s son, who is now in his 60s, but he apparently didn’t believe his father was DB Cooper.
“And that’s fair enough,” said Ulis. “But it’s an intriguing thing all the way round. Vince Petersen was kind of an odd duck. I’ve talked with his former neighbor and been to the home he used to own, and I plan to conduct a search of that home in the near future.
“I hesitate to put a percentage of the likelihood of Vince Petersen being Cooper, but I will say he’s a compelling person of interest.
“And, hopefully, through a combination of efforts, I can either ascertain 100 percent that he wasn’t DB Cooper, or I can ascertain 100 percent that he was DB Cooper.
“Because at the end of the day, it really is a binary choice; It’s either zero percent or 100. It’s not 98 or anything in between.”
A COMPELLING PROFILE
Another crack team of investigators renowned for their work on the DB Cooper investigation is The Case Breakers, led by Thomas J. Colbert, who declined to be interviewed about the Cooper case because, in their mind, they’ve already solved it.
In 2018, Colbert and his team held a news conference outside of the FBI’s headquarters and declared that Robert W. Rackstraw, a Vietnam veteran with a marky past riddled with murder accusations and con-artistry, was the man responsible for the hijacking.
Forty years earlier, the Californian had been “ruled out” as a suspect by the Bureau after a year-long inquiry, but that announcement was disputed by special agents in his home state, who said they were still gathering intelligence on Rackstraw and following up on tips.
Internal FBI documents from that period, released in 2019 under the Freedom of Information Act, show that he was in fact the bureau’s prime suspect.
The 1978 dossiers say he was targeted because “he resembles the artist’s composite” in nine facial points and for “his military background, particularly his paratrooper training.”
His career timeline also painted him a compelling suspect: The specialized High Altitude-Low Open (HALO) parachutist was forced to resign from the Army just months before the 1971 skyjacking and was described as “extremely bitter over his severance.”
When federal agents questioned Rackstraw years later, “he admitted to the arresting agent he would be fully capable of successfully effecting the NORJAK hijacking [FBI’s code-name for the crime],” state the documents.
Another FBI record states he received a less-than-honorable discharge “because of unfitness or unacceptable conduct”, which included lying about his medals, rank, and educational background.
Rackstraw then fumed in a letter to his commanders: “I can only hope that I will never use the training and education the Army gave me against the Army itself, as I would be a formidable advisary [sic].”
Little came of the FBI’s suspicions, but Colbert officially pointed the finger of blame at him in June 2019, after decoding a letter purported to have been written by Cooper to the editor of the Portland Oregonian newspaper shortly after the heist.
“This letter is too [sic] let you know I am not dead but really alive and just back from the Bahamas, so your silly troopers up there can stop looking for me. That is just how dumb this government is. I like your articles about me but you can stop them now. D.B. Cooper is not real,” the letter reads.
“I want out of the system and saw a way through good ole Unk. Now it is Uncle’s turn to weep and pay one of it’s [sic] own some cash for a change. (And please tell the lackey cops D.B. Cooper is not my real name).”
Colbert enlisted the help of Rick Sherwood, a former member of the Army Security Agency, to decode the letter.
Sherwood identified four phrases that were used multiple times – “D.B. Cooper is not real,” “Uncle” or “Unk” which referred to Uncle Sam, “the system,” and “lackey cops.”
He used a system of letters and numbers to decode those phrases and after about two weeks, he translated “through good ole Unk” into “by skyjacking a jet plane” and “And please tell the lackey cops” into “I am 1st LT Robert Rackstraw.”
A nine-digit number typed at the bottom of the letter was said to have only been able to come from Rackstraw because it referred to three covert military units he had ties to during the war.
Another member of the investigation team confirmed Sherwood’s findings, and the group found other links to Rackstraw in other decoded letters.
However, the FBI has never validated the Case Breakers’ work and lists the case as closed but unsolved.
CASE ‘FAR FROM CLOSED’
Colbert alleges a federal coverup, but Ulis is unconvinced The Case Breakers have the right guy.
“There’s absolutely no way Rackstraw was DB Cooper,” he said. “Rackstraw was around 27 years old at the time of the skyjacking.
“In other words, he was just four years older than the flight attendant who put his age at around 50. So it doesn’t make sense, and I don’t think he particularly resembles the sketches or anything of that nature.
“There’s no doubt about it, the case is not solved. This is not just Eric Ulis saying this, it’s the FBI saying this.
“I think we’re close but we don’t have it as of today. And when that moment comes, I think it’s going to either be Vince Petersen or someone who is completely unknown.”
