Part 38, page 205

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

The plane, flying with the wheels and flaps down, would burn a tremendous amount of fuel and could never reach Phoenix, the normal first stop.

A Seattle-to-Reno route would be "a wise choice for a wise hijack- er," the tower proposed. Everyone agreed.

The pilot set a commonplace Victor 23 flight plan over Portland, Eugene, Klamath Falls, then southeast toward Reno.

Dinners were cautiously placed on board, Tina Mucklow was or- dered to leave her seat next to Cooper, where she had ridden most of the flight, go into the front section and close the curtain. The aft cabin lights were turned off.

At 7:30 p.m., the tower cleared Flight 305 for takeoff, and quietly advised Scott he would "have company" all the way down to Reno with "one plane above and one plane below."

WHEN THE 727 lifted off to be- come a tiny dot in the sky, radar operators tracked a total of eight additional planes shadowing the three-engine jet. Six jet fighters, one jet trainer and an H-130 rescue plane with emergency gear and jumpers were launched from bas- es in Washington, Idaho and Cali- fornia. No one was able to main- tain constant visual contact.

The 727 was lumbering along at its slowest possible cruising speed, and the other ships kept shooting past and had to backtrack.

The weather was worsening. Rain clouds quilted the ground. As soon as the plane was level, Coop- er ordered Scott to open the rear cabin door, which on the 727 was under the tail section, and had stairs. Red lights winked in the cockpit as the pressure dropped,

then adjusted. No more instruc- tions: Just the subdued rush of air.

Then, at 8:13 p.m., slightly more than half an hour after the plane took off from Sea-Tac, one of Scott's panel gauges flopped a few times, then settled.

Passenger Cooper had debarked Flight 305.

"YEAH, I packed his para- chutes," said Earl Cossey, 35, of Seattle.

Cossey, a long-time sports jump- er, provided the authorities with two of the four chutes delivered.

"They were just emergency backpacks. Really, they're just used for aerobatic pilots or glider pilots or someone who would use a single parachute for a lifesaving event only. It wouldn't be like a sport parachute."

Was Cooper an experienced sky- diver?

"Heck, no," said Cossey, "at least, not as far as sports jump- ing."

Cossey theorized that the hijack- er may have been a military para- trooper since he at first turned down parachutes coming from Mc- Chord Air Force that would open too soon after jumping. The other factor was his selection of which parachute to use.

"One was more of a sports-type chute with a harness that was real- ly, really comfortable," Cossey ex- plained, "and the other was a mili- tary-type with a very uncomforta- ble harness. And he picked the one that was not comfortable. But they were both equally safe."

In appearances only, as it hap- pened, for one of the other two chutes, hastily borrowed from Linn Emrick of Sky Sports, Inc., was a nonfunctional ground train- ing chute with the canopy com- pletely sewn together.

Cossey said his remaining chute, left on the floor of the plane, was returned to him and is now a treasured souvenir. Officials fig- ured, he said, that Cooper had stripped the nylon from the two other parachute containers, packed them full of money, walked out on the undulating rear stairway of the 727, and dropped into the rain-blackened sky.

Could he have made it?

"Oh, yeah," Cossey insists, firm- ly. "In fact, there was a time that I had high hopes of making a du- plicate jump. The airline wanted to take that same model airplane and go over in the Spokane area where it's very open and let a jumper prove that it could be re-

done. It was all set up but then fell through due to insurance prob- lems. But it's easily done."

Cossey, who has looked at a lot of equipment turned up in the woods by the F.B.I. over the years, feels he can identify his hand-assembled chute if it's found.

"I have a little secret deal with the F.B.I.," he said, with a smile. He told them, "if you ever catch him, I get to talk to him about how he accomplished it."

THE SEARCH AREA was pin- pointed with surprising precision from a combination of recording instruments on board the plane, its speed and altitude, the suspect's weight, and the 23-mile-an-hour wind blowing that night from the northwest. The figures were all fed into a computer at Fort Lewis.

"We were able to fix a 'ground zero'," Tom Manning, F.B.I. resi- dent agent at Longview, said.

"Looking at the possibility that the parachute did not open, and allowing for trajectory of the body from the plane and of the free fall and so on, we started at ground zero and then proceeded in a southwesterly direction, angling toward St. Helen's (Oregon)."

The search started off pretty big, Manning recalls, with dozens of agents, sheriff's deputies from both Clark and Cowlitz Counties, volunteers with fixed-wing search planes, and helicopters from Bonneville Power, the National Guard and even The Weyerhaeus- er Co.

A diamond-shaped area, rough- ly 150 square miles, was divided into six sectors for the search teams. It centered in the Merwin Dam area, about 20 miles south- east of Kelso.

The terrain was mainly low hills with heavy underbrush and a lot of first- and second-growth timber. There was some flat terrain along the river bank, but mostly the search concentrated for almost a week in the rugged country be- tween Vancouver and Kelso.

"If a guy isn't too well versed in hitting into those tall trees, he'd get hung up real easy," a Weyer- haeuser forester, Dick Bohlig, said.

Even though the land is cruised occasionally, "you could walk al- most right underneath it and un- less you weren't looking straight up, you'd never see it," Bohlig said. "If you ever go out and start looking for people in the woods, about the only time you ever find