Part 53, page 147

Transcript

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

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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