Part 47, page 272

Transcript

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

About $5,800 of the Cooper loot was found Feb. 10, 1980, in the Columbia River bank near Vancouver by Brian Ingram, then 8, of Vancouver, who was digging in the sand with a stick during a family outing.

[guess: Ralph] Himmelsbach said Cooper wasn't really prepared for the escapade that began at Portland International Airport on Thanksgiving Eve when a man listed on the manifest as "Dan Cooper" boarded the Boeing 727 with 36 passengers and a crew of six for a short hop to Seattle.

Once airborne, Cooper gave stewardess Florence Schaffner a note saying he had a dynamite bomb in his attache case. He demanded $200,000 in used bills and four parachutes.

Planned to parachute [illegible] The airplane landed at Sea-Tac [guess: Airport] where Cooper allowed the passengers to leave. The plane was refueled while airline officials [illegible] [guess: raced] to get the money.

Cooper said he wanted to go to Mexico, but intended to parachute from the plane as soon as it cleared [illegible] six [guess: miles] [illegible] the airport according to Himmelsbach.

He jumped the rear stairs after telling the pilot to keep the aircraft at 10,000 feet with the flaps down 15 degrees

and the landing gear extended. That kept the airliner's speed at just below 200 miles an hour, indicating Cooper knew something about what he was doing, the former FBI agent said.

But the skyjacker was wearing only a business suit and street shoes when he jumped into a freezing rainstorm with a small-diameter emergency parachute that guaranteed a hard landing. The temperature was seven degrees below zero outside the plane.

That wasn't a very intelligent thing to do and it tells me he didn't know much about parachuting," said Himmelsbach.

In Ceres, Calif., Richard T. Tosaw, a former FBI agent, thinks Cooper is dead, too. But Tosaw, who's written a book about the skyjacking, believes [guess: he] will find Cooper's skeleton strapped in a parachute at the bottom of the Columbia [guess: River].

On Feb. 1, said Tosaw, he's going to take up residence where part of Cooper's ransom money was found, six [guess: miles] downstream on the Columbia from the Interstate 5 bridge. He'll search the river bottom with computerized sonar equipment; so good that you could throw a [guess: mayonnaise] jar in a hundred feet of water and [guess: it'll] find it.