10 Most Shocking Unsolved Crimes
5. The D.B. Cooper Hijacking
On 24 November 1972, Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 was about to complete a routine journey between Portland and Seattle when things took a turn for the dramatic.
An unidentified passenger hijacked the plane and demanded a ransom of $200,000, which he collected at Seattle, before ordering the pilot to hightail it back to Oregon.
At some point during the return flight, he strapped a parachute to his back and leaped out of the plane with the money in his possession. The man the media christened D.B. Cooper was never seen again, and neither was most of that money.
Years later, $5,580 of Cooper's ransom was recovered near the Columbia River, but there's no physical evidence to prove or disprove that he survived his parachute jump.
The Cooper case remains the only unsolved hijacking in US aviation history.