As 170,000 passengers prepare to remove their shoes and belts, put their 3-ounce containers of toothpaste and shampoo in 1-quart plastic bags, and walk through metal detectors to pass through Denver International Airport today, an amazing thing seems to be happening.
Nothing.
“It’s all gone very smoothly,” said
Carrie Harmon, spokeswoman for the Transportation Security Administration.
Last week on the big pre-holiday travel days, the longest wait in a security line at DIA was 30 minutes, she said. Most passengers waited 20 minutes or less.
TSA geared up for the crush with extra staffing, and passengers seemed unfazed by the new rules for carry-ons.
“So far, knock on wood, it’s been pretty quiet,” said DIA spokesman Steve Snyder, who anticipates the airport will join several around the country in setting a record for passenger travel today.
The security rules, while intrusive and often wildly illogical (gel bra inserts, yes; gel shoe inserts, no) already have become routine. It’s a small price to pay for safety, most passengers say, and few even remember the days when a traveler could carry a knife – or a bomb – onto a plane, no questions asked.
It all began 35 years ago with a guy known apocryphally as D.B. Cooper, the only skyjacker in history to extort money from an airline and get away with it.
Whether he lived to tell about it is another question.
It was Nov. 24, Thanksgiving Eve. The plane was nowhere near full and the weather was wretched.
Cooper, who looked like an insurance salesman with his skinny tie and pearl tie tack, began that fateful trip – like so many subsequent skyjackers would – by purchasing a one-way ticket. He paid $20 for a seat on Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 from Portland to Seattle. The ticket was issued under the name of Dan.
Nobody on the 727 suspected a thing until Cooper handed a flight attendant a note saying he wanted $200,000 and four parachutes. He showed her what looked like a bomb in his briefcase.
He seemed serious, so nobody argued.
The pilot landed in Seattle, where all the passengers were released unharmed, and the parachutes and $200,000 in $20 bills (every serial number recorded by the FBI) were delivered to the skyjacker.
Four crew members remained onboard with Cooper, who demanded to be flown toward Mexico at an altitude no higher than 10,000 feet with the wing flaps at 15 degrees and the landing gear down to keep the airspeed below 200 mph.
Once airborne, the plane flew south over the dense temperate rain forest. It was windy, cold and raining when Cooper deployed the rear stairway, jumped out of the plane and vanished.
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover launched an investigation that would survive him by decades. Documents on it have been released over the years under the Freedom of Information Act, and they include stories of two men who claimed to be Cooper. The FBI didn’t believe them.
Despite the manhunt, the only evidence from the crime was found in 1980 by an 8-year-old boy who uncovered $5,800 of the money in the sand along the Columbia River near Vancouver, Wash. No remains of the hijacker, the parachutes or his clothes were ever found.
Difficult as it is to imagine in the post-9/11 world, the daredevil skyjacker became an instant cult hero back in 1971.
Back then with the Nixon administration committing cowardly felonies in Washington, the story of a swashbuckling thief who committed a crime with no collateral damage and then disappeared was the stuff of myth.
The mystery led admirers to speculate that Cooper, the anti-hero, committed the perfect crime. FBI agents, meanwhile, suggested he died in the fall and the forest-covered mountains concealed every possible sign of him forever.
Chances are, even if Dan Cooper survived his jump into the rugged Cascades, he’s dead by now, the money long since spent.
All that’s left of him today is an enduring mystery.
And TSA.
Diane Carman’s column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. She can be reached at 303-954-1489 or dcarman@denverpost.com.
