(Seattle P-I front page) re hijacker search, with photos and route map

FD-350 (Rev. 7-16-63)

(Mount Clipping In Space Below)

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Hijacker There's Still Not A Trace

BY DICK CLEVER P-I Staff

WOODLAND, Clark County — The man who hijacked a Northwest Airlines jetliner may have parachuted into the darkness over the gently rolling and wooded hills of this Southwest Washington countryside with his $200,000 ransom money.

At least that's the best hunch law officers had to work with yesterday, based on information passed to them by Northwest's headquarters in Minneapolis.

The "cool" middle-aged air pirate, who vanished Wednesday night somewhere between Seattle and Reno, Nev., left law officers and airline officials stunned by disbelief. Some even expressed admiration for the hijacker's skill and daring.

"You have to admire the guy, in a way," said one Clark County deputy privately. "If he made it, he's really pulled one off."

Crew members of the 727 jetliner said in Minneapolis yesterday they had no idea when the hijacker parachuted from the plane.

Capt. William Scott, pilot of the aircraft, said the hijacker ordered the rear door of the plane opened shortly after takeoff from Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

"We never heard from him again, but we assumed he was there," Scott said.

The hijacker had enforced his demands for money and parachutes by displaying a device made from two red cylinders connected by wires to a briefcase.

Tina Mucklow, the stewardess who remained aboard for the flight to Reno after the 36 passengers and two other stewardesses were released, said of the hijacker: "He was impatient for a time, but never cruel, nasty or impolite to me in any way."

Scott said the hijacker did not specify any route between Seattle and Reno. And he discounted any possibility that the man could have received a signal from an accomplice from the ground because of the low clouds encountered by the plane during most of the flight.

Scott said the hijacker apparently tied himself to a seat to prevent being swept out the door when it was first opened. In Woodland, authorities were to resume this morning what some authorities confided may be a futile search for clues to the hijacking.

Undersheriff Tom McDowell told The P-I, "we hope to find something."

Tom Manning, of the FBI's Longview office, was coordinating search efforts from the command post here.

Authorities were aided by helicopter pilots from Weyerhaeuser Company and the Bonneville Power Administration who are familiar with the terrain to be covered.

A 150-square mile area roughly diamond-shaped was marked off on a map and divided into six sectors for search teams.

Manning said the information and date by which the area was defined was fed into a computer at Ft. Lewis. He said the information was partly based upon flight data provided by Northwest.

Weather reports indicate there was a southwesterly wind of about 30 miles an hour blowing through the Clark County foothills at about the time officials think the hijacker might have jumped. Manning said the plane was flying 200 miles per hour at an altitude of 7,000 feet as it passed over Clark County.

Expert parachutists in Seattle said a chutist could drift as much as three miles from the [guess: exiting] point of his jump in those wind conditions.

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(Indicate page, name of newspaper, city and state.)

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p. Al Seattle Post- Intelligencer Seattle, Wash.

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Date: 11/27/71 Edition: Final Author: Dick Clever Editor: Dick Lyall Title: UNSUB; Northwest Airlines, Flight 305 Portland to Seattle, Character: 11/24/71 or CAA-HIJACKING; EXT. Classification: 164-31 Submitting Office: Seattle

☐ Being Investigated

COPY SENT TO BUREAU

SEARCHED .... INDEXED ........ SERIALIZED .........FILED ........

1/71 FBI—SEATTLE

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Experts say the hijacker could survive a jump under the conditions he was faced with if he was an experi- enced jumper. All evidence gathered so far indicates the man was, indeed, expe- rienced. Members of parachute clubs in the Portland area have already been contact- ed by FBI agents searching for clues to the hijacker's identity. It has been estab-

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lished that the man boarded the plane in Portland. The hijacker demanded and received four para- chutes along with 10,000 $20 bills. The package of bills, according to Northwest au- thorities, weighed 24½ pounds and measured eight by six by 27 inches. When the plane landed in Reno the air pirate, his booty and the brief case were gone. Manning said one of the remaining parachutes was partially torn. He said the hijacker may have used pieces of that chute to bind the money to him when he jumped. Crew members said in Minneapolis that the hijack- er had demanded the money in a knapsack and was an- gry when it was delivered in a white cloth sack. Experts say that unless the man had found a way to bind the money bag to him, he would have lost it. "At that speed anything he carried would be ripped out of his hands," said Earl Cossey of Sky Sport, Inc., a Seattle parachutist club. It was Cossey who packed three of the four chutes pro- vided by Northwest Airlines to the hijacker. The fourth

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chute was a ground training chute and would not have functioned had the hijacker been forced to use it, Cos- sey said. Yet that training chute, a chestpack "reserve" para- chute was one of those missing from the plane when it landed in Reno. Cossey said the hijacker would have used the back- pack chute first, however. And he said it would "work fine." An Air Force spokesman said yesterday that as many as eight military aircraft were trailing the hijacked liner. A spokesman at McChord Air Force Base said two F106 fighters were dis- patched from there and were joined by a T33 jet trainer already airborne. He said two F102 fighters were sent by the Idaho Air National Guard at Boise. A C130 rescue aircraft with rescue parachutists aboard was launched from Hamil- ton AFB, just north of San Francisco. Finally, the Air Force spokesman said, two more F106s already airborne over California joined in shadow- ing the Boeing 727. However, officials said,

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the military planes were not able to maintain con- stant visual contact with the liner because of the weather conditions and the slow speed at which it was flying. None of the pursuing planes saw a parachutist jump from the 727, the offi- cials said. The search resumes today in the bucolic, sparsely pop- ulated back country of Clark County for a man who law officers concede will be difficult, perhaps impossi- ble, to find whether dead or alive.

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—P-I Photos by Cary Tolman. AUTHORITIES SEARCHED THIS FOGGY AREA OF CLARK COUNTY FOR HIJACKER Foothills east of Woodland are mixture of forest and farm land

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FBI AGENT TOM MANNING, center, assigned search crews to sectors of area authorities believe hijacker may have parachuted from the jetliner. Gathered around the map at the Woodland command post are, from bottom left, helicopter pilot Bobby Hall, Sgt. M. A. Miller, Undersheriff Tom McDowell and Sgt. Arch Thornberry.

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WASH. COWLITZ COUNTY KALAMA COLUMBIA RIVER 503 CLARK COUNTY ETNA WOODLAND AMBOY ORE. ST. HELENS YACOLT HEISSON

--P-I Map by Bob Cavanaugh. MAP SHOWS ROUTE, SEARCH AREA OF HIJACKED JETLINER Where did man jump, parachute symbol, with the $200,000 in cash?

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