Originally Posted by
PersonFromPorlock
IIRC, Cooper demanded two parachutes and said he was going to force one of the stewardesses to use one of them, forestalling any funny business with the equipment.
I'm not very knowledgeable about parachutes but I know some folks here are. These are some of the accounts of the parachutes involved in the hijacking:
Acquiring the parachutes was a lot harder than collecting the $200,000. Tacoma’s McChord Air Force Base offered to provide the parachutes but Cooper rejected this offer. He wanted civilian parachutes with user-operated ripcords, not military-issued ones. Seattle cops eventually contacted the owner of a skydiving school. His school was closed but they persuaded him to sell them four parachutes. When the officers had the parachutes, they hurried to the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.
Cooper’s hijacking note did not directly explain his plan to skydive from the plane but his demands led officials to that assumption. Since he had asked for an extra parachute, they assumed he planned to take a passenger or crew member with him as an airborne hostage. They thought about using dummy parachutes for the exchange with Cooper but they couldn’t risk the life of a civilian.
D.B. Cooper - Crime Museum
Two of the parachutes, both chest-mounted reserve chutes, were from Issaquah Skyport, which was owned by Linn Emirch, and the two main backpack parachutes were provided by FBI Special Agent Harold Campbell said in Las Vegas, Nevada, that one of two chutes found onboard the Boeing 727 when it landed without the hijacker in Reno, Nevada, had been opened. But, the supplier of four parachutes delivered to the hijacker revealed the following night that one of the reserve chutes was a ground training model that could not have opened.
Cossey said he had packed the other three chutes and was sure they were functional - the chest pack used as the reserve could not have been fastened on the main parachute harness because it lacked D-rings, and had been delivered to the hijacker at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport only by mistake., an FAA Master Parachute Rigger and parachuting instructor, from his home.
FBI Special Agent Harold Campbell said in Las Vegas, Nevada, that one of two chutes found onboard the Boeing 727 when it landed without the hijacker in Reno, Nevada, had been opened. But, the supplier of four parachutes delivered to the hijacker revealed the following night that one of the reserve chutes was a ground training model that could not have opened.
Cossey said he had packed the other three chutes and was sure they were functional - the chest pack used as the reserve could not have been fastened on the main parachute harness because it lacked D-rings, and had been delivered to the hijacker at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport only by mistake.
D B Cooper's Jump
The parachutes provided to the skyjacker came from an Issaquah skydive center that had recently purchased them from Cossey. The one Cooper apparently used was a military-issue NB6, nylon, 28-foot with a conical canopy.
Over the decades, as parachutes were sometimes discovered in the area of Cooper's jump, the FBI turned to Cossey to ask if they were the real thing.
"They keep bringing me garbage," Cossey told The Associated Press in 2008, after the FBI brought him a silk parachute discovered by children playing at a recently graded road in Southwest Washington. "Every time they find squat, they bring it out and open their trunk and say, 'Is that it?' and I say, 'Nope, go away.' Then a few years later they come back."
That didn't keep Cossey from having fun at the expense of reporters who covered that discovery. He told some who happened to call him on April Fools' Day that year that the chute was, in fact, Cooper's.
One reporter called him back and angrily said he could get fired for writing a false story, Cossey said. Another said the newsroom was amused by the prank.
As indicated in the link headline below, Cossey's body was found in his home in 2013.
Body found in Washington home of D.B. Cooper parachute packer | OregonLive.com
Like details in many other legendary criminal cases, the provenance of the parachutes has been the subject of some dispute:
In examining Cossey’s stature in the Norjak investigation, his most damaging statement was that he was the owner of the back chutes. This claim has come under increasing disbelief as federal documents reveal that the parachutes were owned and delivered to Sea-Tac airport by a Kent pilot named Norman Hayden.
Further, scrutiny of Mr. Cossey’s analysis of the survivability of the Cooper jump and the parachutes the skyjacker used has also come into question as other experts in the field refute Cossey’s view, most notably Mark Metzler. At the 2011 Symposium in Portland, Metzler thoroughly rebuffed Cossey’s claim that the 28-foot military NB-8 was a poor choice, and stated that as a naval pilot emergency rig it most likely would have a canopy designed for a high-speed jet opening. This perspective contrasted sharply with Cossey’s oft-stated contention that Cooper should have chosen the civilian sport chute because it was designed for a softer opening.
Cossey may not have had a formal partnership with the FBI, but he was clearly their go-to-guy for parachute questions. When I asked an agent or the PIO about Cooper and his chutes I would be directed towards Coss.
...Additionally, Cossey had told me conflicting pieces of information over several phone interviews since 2009, such as whether he had provided an NB-8 or an NB-6 parachute, and the exact name of the second, not-used chute. In one instance Cossey called it a “Paradise” and on another he said it was a Pioneer.
When I asked for a clarification on the story that he had stuffed a 28-foot canopy into an NB-6 rather than the larger NB-8 sack, he told me the stuffing story was “pretty much accurate.” He later said that the tightly-packed rig was another reason why this chute – that Cooper allegedly used – was a hard pull.
Along those lines, Cossey has never explained why he modified a pilot’s emergency rig to make it more difficult to use. Cossey had told me and many others that he had re-located the rip cord on the chute and had tucked the handle into a pouch under the right arm-pit, thus making the chute a “double-pull.” This meant that Cooper would need two tugs on the rip cord to successfully deploy the rig – one out of the pouch and a second up and away to free the canopy.
Further, Cossey has never explained why he sent the two back chutes to Boeing Field first and not Sea-Tac where the skyjacker waited.
https://themountainnewswa.net/2013/0...b-cooper-case/