After 45 years, FBI closes investigation into unsolved 'DB Cooper' hijacking
komonews.com
komonews.com
But fascinating to read the Wikipedia entry and realize that DB Cooper, and the no less than 15 copycat "parachute hijackings" he inspired in the same year, created a watershed moment in Airport Security that accelerated our steady march to today's over bearing TSA:
"In all, 15 hijackings similar to Cooper's—all unsuccessful—were attempted in 1972.[130] With the advent of universal luggage searches in 1973 (see Airport security) the general incidence of hijackings dropped precipitously.[131]"
[0] http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the-cia-proved-that-a-boein...
Before all those hijackings, there was no airport security screening. None at all! I know that's hard to believe, but we've all gotten used to it since we've had something in place now for about 40 years.
There has to be something we can do to ensure safety, but that's less overbearing than today's TSA.
If we really wanted to be safer, we'd stop creating droves of new enemies every day in our pursuit of global military empire. Most of my fellow Americans remain blissfully unaware that we are bombing people, arming jihadists, and backing dictators every day, but the people getting bombed and oppressed are quite aware of what is what.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/a-cluster-b...
Its inevitable that we are going to continue facing blowback for our actions, but unfortunately its heresy for the masters of conventional wisdom to admit that their policies make life more dangerous for everyone.
http://www.salon.com/2016/07/11/u_s_backed_syrian_rebels_com...
Then the big security threat shifts from what a hijacker can do with a jet packed full of humans and fuel to what a hacker can do by seizing control of the whole network, but the travel experience itself wouldn't need such invasive screening.
All my family lives in Europe. I live on the US west coast. "hopping city to city" would turn a 1 day nuissance into an arduous journey.
No thanks. I already see my family only once to twice a year.
Considering there are multiple flights per day between SFO and Paris and other EU hubs, I think my case is far from being a corner case.
302,382 people flew from SFO to Europe in May 2016. That's a lot of people. Almost 5% of the Bay Area population and there are 2 more international airports in the region. [0]
[0] http://media.flysfo.com.s3.amazonaws.com/media/sfo/media/air...
Same principle applies to express trains, and dwell times at stations. The benefit of high speed is lost just decelerating and accelerating from every stop it has to make.
>The bomb only created a relatively small hole in the plane's fuselage, however, and the aircraft was able to return to Mogadishu and land safely. Somali authorities now believe that they know who carried the bomb onto the plane and detonated it: A man who was then sucked out of the hole in the fuselage and became the attack's only fatality. (Only two minor injuries were reported among other passengers and crew.)
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2016/02/05/somali_air...
"Passengers on a Daallo Airlines flight leaving from Mogadishu were subjected to just about the most terrifying experience imaginable on Tuesday as a bomb exploded in the plane's passenger cabin somewhere above 12,000 feet."
Note that while 12,000 feet is well above sea level, it's only 4,000 feet above effective internal cabin altitude of 8,000'. So the fuselage stresses are vastly lower than those at 29,000'. The pressure differential is about 10 pa (pascals), vs. about 40 pa at 29,000'. That's roughly 1.5 psi vs. 11.5 psi -- there's nearly 10x the pressure differential at FL29.
12,000' probably has an internal cabin pressure of around 3,000' to 3,500' and of course it's unlikely to be at exactly 12,000' during detonation.
Turbulence can cause massive stress on an airframe so their tougher than you would think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rak2HldVp9M
It's like saying a rope that's living 500 pounds is under 5x the load as one lifting 100 pounds while ignoring it's designed to lift cars. And for a rather extreme example: http://www.aloha.net/~icarus/index.htm 30' just gone.
There have been some spectacularly involved structural failures, with Aloha Airlines 243 perhaps the most impressive of these.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aloha_Airlines_Flight_243
Crucially important:
1. No major structural members were involved. The aircrafts main beams run beneath the cabin and cargo floors. As it was, loss of structural integrity of the outer envelope introduced significant additional flex to the airframe which the pilots had to compensate for.
2. No critical control systems were involved. In the Pan Am 103 case, steering cables were severed.
3. There was no internal overpressure or extended hull damage. In AA243, the initial rupture was the result of corrosive metal fatigue and delamination of the outer skin.
The point is without that knowledge and access by the time you have enough HE to take down a modern jumbo jet you can also use it to kill a very large number of people in other ways.
Remember, most bombings are really poorly executed at a technical level. Army's use grenades because they work. If you want to do as much damage to a crowd as possible your better off with a large number of fragmentation grenades than a suicide vest. Create a choke point, detonate something to create a crush, blow up the densely packed crowd.
PS: Mortars are frightfully effective yet tiny.
Not necessarily, but for all intents and purposes, yes.
Pre-9/11, pre-Richard Reid airport security was generally sensible and not too much of a burden.
Not really. Honestly the best places are probably TSA checkpoints considering how slow and clogged they get. In almost any amusement park during the summer (one of the reasons Disney searches all bags and has undercover security everywhere). Time Square at various times.
Yes exploding on a plane likely kills 100+ at once but in all honestly I would imagine it's far easier to do it elsewhere you just might need a tiny bit more explosive material.
And now I'm thoroughly depressed. Life is so fragile...well on the scale I care about.
Are you sure? The majority of largest terrorist attacks, casualty wise, didn't even involve a plane except for September 11th attacks (obviously several did but not the majority) [1].
> The recent airport bombings didn't kill as many people as a single airplane. I'm tempted to blame it on incompetence, but we shouldn't deny the facts.
That airport bombing was very different than the suggested TSA security line hypothetical as the airports in Istanbul work fundamentally different (I addressed in the other comment).
What facts am I denying? I always try to base my opinion around only facts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_battles_and_other_viol...
Airplanes might not be targeted as much, but that wiki link shows they are the most deadly per bomb. The other high-fatality bombings were multiple bombs.
In the end, my point is that despite the concern for security lines, they don't seem to end up being the massive disaster they could be. Certainly they are not worse than the airplane attacks they seek to prevent, which is the main point.
Fundamentally different than the TSA lines I referenced. In Istanbul they have two security checkpoints, one brief one at the entrance to the airport itself and another further in similar to the TSA. The attackers mostly pushed their way through the first one and it ended up being a choke point for them. They didn't get near where the bulk of the people were.
> The Lockerbie bomber used a small cassette player filled with Semtex to kill 243 people -- aided by 90,000kg of jet fuel and 31,000ft of gravity.
Hence why I didn't discount it. Attempting to brings explosives onto a plane and setting them off seems like a far more difficult task than doing it in an area with a similar people concentration and zero people checking your bags.
The US government's approach is pretty obvious is to attempt to prevent attacks through various means (reducing risks at airpoint checkpoints, keeping tabs on ammonium nitrate sales, etc), pursing investigations of people deemed vulnerable to terrorist manipulation, and blunting the impact of anything that does happen. When you watch the public coverage when something happens, there's a few common narratives, and they are always focused on portraying the offenders as loners who "aren't taking orders" from anyone.
The initial bomb damage was a 50cm (20in) hole. Disruption of control systems (steering and stabilizer cables) lead to a pitch of the aircraft, aerodynamic forces of a 500kph (313 kn) airstream tore off the nose of the aircraft, parts of which impacted with and initiated further disintegration of trailing portions.
Again: fuel did not contribute to the damage inflicted on the aircraft.
I'm sure NYC would be perfectly willing to have the right to search all people entering the city (or at least Manhattan, which has a limited set of entry points, so it's easier to check). The Democrats could be convinced with a gun violence argument ("all those guns used to come from nearby states with more lax gun laws, but now we can stop them!"), and the Republicans of course would be satisfied with a bit of talk about terrorism.
Uh absolutely not. Nobody who lives in the city would vote for that, ESPECIALLY if it was just for Manhattan (since most people in Manhattan during the day don't live there).
NYC transit, much of the time, is a relatively well-oiled machine and introducing a huge delay like that would make the city explode in anger.
NYPD already has some "checkpoints" setup outside of certain subway entrances where they "randomly" (you can probably guess how random it is) pull people off to check their baggage.
Rarely do they check more than 1/1000 people entering the subway (and that's being extremely generous, it's probably far less frequent), because there might literally be a riot if they backed up an entire subway station checking everyone entering.
Yeah, I don't think the guy you replied to is familiar with Manhattan at all, otherwise he wouldn't have said "a limited set of entry points".
I just counted 16 different subway lines entering Manhattan. And that's only counting "1" for each line the MTA map groups together. And that's not counting the PATH trains. Or all the trains that come into Penn Station. Or all the trains that come into Grand Central.
Then there are the bridges. Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburgh, 59th street, Triborough, George Washington. Probably a few smaller ones up in the Bronx that I'm forgetting.
Then there is the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, the Queens Midtown Tunnel. Others?
Oh, and there are countless ferries crossing the Hudson River and the East River. Plus the Staten Island Ferry.
And some heliports.
I've forgotten half of it, since I haven't lived there in 40+ years. And my names are probably obsolete. I know that one of those structures was renamed after Ed Koch, but probably nobody in NYC uses that name.
You can certainly enumerate them all if you tried hard enough. So, definitely "a limited set of entry points".
It would be more informative to say "a large and very busy set of entry points".
Just in case it was bugging you: The 59th St bridge is officially the "Ed Koch Queensboro bridge," but totally correct that nobody calls it that. Sometimes you'll hear it called "Queensboro bridge," though.
They also keep trying to get everyone to call the Triborough bridge "RFK bridge" (they even officially renamed the bridge), but I think it'll be a cold day in hell before people actually start using that name.
Airport security lines would be an obvious target with hundreds of people (at the larger terminals).
Major cities are full of areas where hundreds of people routinely gather within a small radius. Airplanes aren't special.
I do, however, think that it's important not to let those people onto planes in contrast to buses, street corners, etc. because otherwise someone might take control of an entire plane, which can do a lot more damage than a bomb/pistol/etc, you know?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life#Life_Value_in_th...
The TSA's annual budget is $7.5 billion, of which only part gets spent on checked baggage screening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Admini...
So those are some very rough numbers, but I think they will come out favoring screening. I'd be very interested in the calculation if you'd like to try to be more exact! The hardest part will be estimating the counterfactual bombing rate, but I bet the FBI has expert estimates of this somewhere.
There are obviously some risks here, as the door is opened briefly twice, but there are a number of steps taken to minimize this risk.
The biggest realized risk seems to have been Germanwings Flight 9525. A suicidal co-pilot waited until the Captain left the cockpit. Then he locked the door and flew the plane into the side of a mountain.
An attack can be designed against any vulnerability. Whether that attack becomes practically executable remains to be seen.
Protocols to ensure two crew members in the cockpit at all times are now being considered.
There was an exceptionally good essay on implications of this incident, with computer/systems security implications, though I cannot locate it. James Fallows' Atlantic piece was good, though not quite what I was looking for.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/03/ger...
As we've seen, a plane can be devastating when used as a weapon, so I think it is sensible to deny terrorists to the cockpit at the expense of the passengers. Theoretically, there are few situations where passengers can be forcibly restrained, since they should outnumber any people trying to seize the plane by quite a bit, passengers could (and have[2]) attempted to neutralize the threat themselves (as they understand the possible consequences of waiting out the situation in this era where the goal is not money, but chaos).
Even if we did away with security entirely and let people carry guns on board, there would be literally zero risk of a hijacked plane in the US thanks to the locked doors. (There might be other reasons not to do that, but hijacking fears are not one of them).
And even then, it's arguable that this would still be impossible. 9/11 happened because hijacking protocol never took into account the possibility that the hijackers would use the plane itself as a weapon. The people on the final hijacked plane on 9/11 did know this, because they received calls about the WTC, so they fought back and forced the plane to crash, thwarting the hijackers' plans.
There is a happy medium between TSA molestation and not even attempting to stop the most obvious attempts to bring bombs and weapons. It's interesting and strange to me that so many people react so badly to the TSA that they want to do away with this stuff altogether. I wonder if they realize how frequent incidents were back before airport security.
In that period, there was an average of something like 30-40 per year in the US. And air travel has increased substantially since then, so if we saw that rate today it would be more like 60-100 per year, or one every few days. Looking at it another way, about one in 100,000 flights were hijacked, compare that to the modern rate of fatal crashes of somewhere around one in 10 million to one in 100 million. (The number is very approximate because not enough crashes happen to get an accurate idea of the risk anymore.)
Now, hijacking don't have to be fatal, but they also don't have to be safe. Even a fairly small fatality rate (for a hostage situation) would catapult air travel from the safest mode of transportation available to the most dangerous. And people like blowing stuff up too. If anyone can build a big pipe bomb and bring it onto an airplane with no risk of being caught, the rate of exploding airliners would look more like that old hijacking rate than the modern rate of essentially indistinguishable from zero.
Airliners are easy and attractive targets. You get a lot more bang for your buck there. For example, the bombs used at the Boston Marathon would have killed a couple hundred people on an airplane, versus three people when detonated on the street.
I see no evidence that the increased screening measures since 2001 have helped things at all. But it seems crazy to me to argue for zero security. We tried that, it worked poorly, and basic x-ray machines and metal detectors cut the rate way down.
1. Is tremendously fragile. It's an inflated sausage with a fragile skin, with half its takeoff weight as highly flamable, very high-energy fuel, soaring at altitudes and speeds which will almost certainly tear it to pieces, more particularly if control systems are affected, from even a modest blast. You'd need tens to thousands of times as much explosive to do remotely similar damage on ground.
2. Survivors of any initial blast are unlikely to survive subsequent developments.
3. Of their nature, airline passengers tend towards the wealthy and influential: businesspeople, legislators, and others with significant responsibility and importance within social structures.
4. The vehicle itself can be used as a weapon in ways few other vehicles can. A bomb used to direct an aircraft to a specific destination becomes a tremendous lever (as in 9/11).
The bomb which brought down Pan Am 103 (the Lockerbie incident) weighed a few ounces. The bomb Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols constructed for the Oklahoma City attack weighed 7,000 lb and filled a truck.
The Boston Marathon bombing involved two devices, several kilograms each. Three people were killed. Yes, 264 others were injured, some quite seriously. But the same explosives divided, say, amongst a number of aircraft could have killed many hundreds, possibly 1,000 or more.
Yes, highly strategic explosives placement might be able to disrupt other sites or forms of infrastructure. But the physical, medical, economic, social, and symbolic impacts of few other attacks are as high as those on aircraft.
From what I've heard, Israeli nightclub searches are sort of like that -- drugs and such are fine (even though banned/illegal), but no weapons.
My understanding (possibly mistaken) is that checked baggage was NOT X-Rayed until after 9/11. I remember at the time one of the "fixes" was to X-Ray checked bags, and I remember being stunned to find out they simply hadn't bothered before.
If they didn't x-ray carry-on, ask yourself this, why didn't the hijackers just bring AK-47's in their briefcases.
> If they didn't x-ray carry-on, ask yourself this, why didn't the hijackers just bring AK-47's in their briefcases.
Starting in 1970, there were at least 44 air hijackings worldwide over the next decade, over half of them before 1973.
I'm surprised they don't have an (even unannounced) THX-1138 style limit on how much effort they spend on a single suspect. My wife had her purse stolen and about $10,000 extracted from various accounts a few years back, and the amount of effort they spent on the case is far less than a 20th of this one.
Declaring the case closed is an administrative issue, nothing more.
Theoretically, the job could be done by a single python script with a direct line to some central currency database fed by all banks and local law enforcement but with government, everything is more complicated.
Then it would matter not that it isn't quite career enhancing. And, it's exactly the kind of case you want to be on.
There are loose parallels to the fates of the three guys who escaped from Alcatraz in 1962, and whose bodies were never found. http://www.npr.org/2012/06/12/154766199/50-years-later-myste... and also: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-30349106
Survival theories end up getting very contrived in both cases. The rational side of me votes "Dead," but I can still be lured into reading an occasional speculative piece that tries to go somewhere with the last sliver of doubt.
In Cooper's case, the potential landing area was so vast & rugged that I'm guessing even the stubborn souls at the FBI couldn't pull off anything resembling an effective, quadrant-by-quadrant search for remains.
Would bones left out in the open still be identifiable? Or are they most likely dust by now?
How extensive really is surveillance of bill serial numbers? I mean, sure, he couldn't show up to close on a house with suitcases fully of those bills, but if it's not every routine deposit at every bank, seems possible that he could have spent it slowly.
Beyond the police angle, metrics on how quickly money is circulating is probably useful data for Fed economists.
It seems unlikely that in 1972, or even today, you could inspect anything but a minute portion of the cash in circulation.
He definitely could have spent it without it being detected, especially overseas.
Interestingly, all the DB Cooper stuff was one reason Perris shut it down. It cost them an inordinate amount of money to get through the red tape to be able to allow sport skydiving out of it (courtesy of the 'Cooper Lock' modifications), that once the engines came due for maintenance, they opted not to throw more money down the drain. It was a sad, sad day for the skydiving world.
What's it like to jump the jet?
The most impressive (for me) aircrafts that I jumped were the C-27J Spartan and MI8 helicopter, but I don't think they come close to the jet.
[0] https://xkcd.com/1400/https://www.reddit.com/r/UnresolvedMysteries/comments/3sdg9u...
No idea if it's really the 75yo posting to reddit, but the story is so elaborate, if it's a hoax I'd still like it.
and a picture: http://cbsnews2.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2000/08/22/ca3bd939-a...
KOMO seems to have misinterpreted the press release: the FBI is not closing the case, they're discontinuing active investigation. The case remains open, and new physical evidence is still accepted.