BADDIES
THE HIJACKING OF AMERICAN FLIGHT 119
How D. B. Cooper inspired a skyjacking craze and the FBI’s battle to stop it
JOHN WIGGER
352pp. Oxford University Press. £22.99 (US $29.95).
In the early 1970s Steve McQueen was the biggest action star in America. But on November 24, 1971, he was eclipsed by a man called Dan Cooper. At least, that’s the name he was going by. No one knew his real identity.
On that rainy Wednesday in Portland, Oregon, Cooper walked into the city’s airport and bought a oneway ticket to Seattle, Washington. He didn’t draw attention to himself. With his short hair, clean shave, black suit and briefcase, he looked like an average businessman. After take-off he gave a stewardess a note that read: “Miss – I have a bomb here”. He unlocked his briefcase; there were wires and dynamite inside. Cooper was hijacking the flight. His demands were $200,000 in banknotes and several parachutes.
The plane landed in Seattle as planned. Waiting on the tarmac were FBI agents with the ransom and the parachutes. In exchange Cooper let the passengers disembark. The crew stayed on board and the plane soon departed, destined for Mexico. But Cooper had no intention of going there. He taped the money around his waist and put one of the parachutes on. Then he jumped out of the plane. The FBI never found him.
Cooper’s caper grabbed headlines instantly. Scrambling for a scoop, a reporter mistakenly wrote that the skyjacker had called himself D. B. Cooper, and the initialized version stuck. He became the source of inspiration for a novel by James M. Cain, the master of hardboiled fiction, and a film starring Robert Duvall.
Cooper also spawned a horde of copycats. But, as John Wigger reveals in his rollicking book, most were bad at being baddies. One criminal mastermind, for instance, wore a pillowcase as a mask as he tried, without success, to hijack a United Airlines flight. The bulk of the book, however, focuses on Martin McNally – a hapless young man who hijacked American Airlines Flight 119 in June 1972. McNally dreamt of outdoing Cooper and, against all odds, he almost did.
Wigger recounts his story engagingly. In some chapters the prose is so littered with technical details that it reads like a special issue of Aviation News. (Wigger, a history professor, is also a former pilot.) But at its best The Hijacking of American Flight 119 evokes the universe of Elmore Leonard’s novels. Small-time crooks square off against chain-smoking FBI agents and the moral of the story is the old one that crime doesn’t pay, except – if he survived the jump – for Dan Cooper. Whoever he may have been.
CYCLING
VIVA BARTALI! DAMIAN WALFORD DAVIES
72pp. Seren. Paperback, £
