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No, you didn't. But if you compare (say) the number of murders in the US with the number of murders in Honduras or Haiti, it makes Honduras and Haiti seem pretty tame, too. That's why rate matters. Wendy P.

Thankfully with the family assisting us we should be able to find some of these answers. It's always difficult when you are chasing a suspect and the family is closed off because for this to be solved I believe you simply must be able to penetrate that family wall. Our team feels very blessed that we have family cooperation. The family didn't seem too shocked at the implication. Tom is working to get a few things from the family so he can scan.

Hi Peter, So is the Grassy Knoll; but, I am sure that you would be surprised about the number of 2nd shooters that were there. Jerry Baumchen

"They never do, the instrument is not perfect there are always error bars. That is a match for all practical purposes. The tolerance on the instrument are generally about 1% so in reality there should not even be any decimals" - Tom Kaye. I sent Tom what you said and that was his response.

How would Jesus execute people?

Indeed they could. But I think it would indeed be advisory only, a recommendation. When that FAA letter to the USPA came out years ago, supposedly explaining and clarifying what the rules on life limits were, that letter was unfortunately unclear in one bit of wording. So it didn't clear things up completely. Some riggers certainly argue that the only mandatory limit is if it is part of the original TSO certification. That's the interpretation I tend to follow and think is correct based on the messy wording in the letter. Still, others might interpret that if the manual the parachute came with now lists a life, then from that point onwards there is a life limit. It is common for companies to put age limits on pilot rig canopies and containers, while not putting limits on most sport gear. Just a quirk of the way the industry has developed. While age limits are accepted as normal in a few places in Europe, it wouldn't go over well with skydivers here as it just hasn't been the historical way it is done. But for a pilot, well the rig is just another expensive part that has some form of time limits. "Inspect this part on the plane at 1000 hours, overhaul that prop at 10 years, replace the emergency parachute at 20 years, whatever, it's all similar." The FAA letter says that to to make a mandatory service life, the manufacturer issues a Safety Bulletin with safety concerns and recommends the FAA issue an Airworthiness Directive -- and that AD would establish a mandatory life. But I also understand those riggers who simply choose to follow a manufacturer recommendation.

Darren said he wanted to interview Schreuder. STILL WAITING! Posts tonight are interesting and thoughtful. Appreciate that. Good luck!! It appears there are some good people working so .... Happy Thanksgiving to all. ..................

Yes, I believe Darren has indicated that he’d like to do a Vordahl episode with us.

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1138357929/alabama-executions-pause-lethal-injection It's time to end this cruel farce once and for all.

Evidently the USSC has stabbed trump in the back. House Dem's will soon be pouring over his tax returns. He sure can pick-em. This means of course if trump wins again. The USSC will be expanded.

We don't know how successful he was or wasn't. He lived in a 1600 square foot home from 1967 to his death in 2002. He appears to be upper middle class at the most. He didn't get rich off his patents. 93% of the SR-71 is coated in a Vordahl patent but he didn't make a dime off its success because he was a salaried employee at the time. All of his inventions were assigned to other companies. Vordahl also suffered from a neurological disease that would eventually kill him. Trying to make sense of him or his actions is about as difficult as trying to determine his politics when you read through his writings.

For me, I'm waiting to hear more details about his life and his state of affairs at the time of the hijacking. Was he in debt ? Was he employed ? Was he part of that lay off ? Divorce/marital problems ?

I was only looking at Dan Cooper's or Daniel Cooper's.. not all Cooper's. The takeaway is that it wasn't as common as I thought and Daniel was 4X more common than Dan.. If you include all Cooper's then all significance is lost..

They would be skin cells, not nuclear dna, unless there are blood cells there. The FBI apparently has a skin cell swab from the tie which produced a multiple donor partial of some kind. They stated the kit the lab used so we know the loci that were tested for .... but the FBI wont share the information. Kaye supposedly took dna samples from the tie but that got botched/contaminated by himself.

Hi John, For almost all of my life I have been opposed to capital punishment. A couple of lifetimes ago, when I was in Basic Training, SSGT Don A. Willocks once told us that he thought a sentence of life in prison was worse that being executed. I had to give that some thought. Some time ago, we had a fairly consistent poster on here, Andy9o8 who was opposed to capital punishment with an exemption that if you killed or had someone killed, while you were incarcerated, you could be put to death. I had to give that some thought also. I decided to agree with Andy9o8. * Jerry Baumchen * I wish he were still posting here, as he was an attorney & always gave us well thought out input. As do a few others on here. PS) IMO The Innocence Project has provided more than sufficient evidence to eliminate this barbaric practice. Innocence Project - Help us put an end to wrongful convictions! Innocence Project - Wikipedia

Pastafarianism is the way and the light.

I wonder if the imaginary man would find certain people beyond redemption and forgiveness? My personal lord and savior the flying spaghetti monster is against all executions except for mass murderers. No real question about guilt once you rule out an insanity defense. He doesn't redeem anyone or forgive sins, people can do that themselves, but he just happens to think that someone who perpetrates a mass causality isn't going to turn their lives around.

The plant manager at TIMET who fired all these people in August 71 was named Don Cooper, fwiw.

How Christian of you.

You guys have lost your objectivity,, those particles have nothing to do with the patent.. they don't even match each other. Those particles are not exclusive to any patent. There are 100's of thousands particles on the tie you can randomly match anything.. and these still don't actually match the patent. Titanium with some % Antimony is not exclusive.. https://www.freepatentsonline.com/3266951.pdf His hair is parted on the wrong side in the pic closest to the hijacking date. He has small and beady eyes.. his ears are smallish and stick out. He does not have the dark Latin features and appearance.. Cooper did not have a bubba gump lower lip, Cooper's lower lip "sort of" protruded. Lips were thin, lower was thicker and "sort of" protruded aka slightly.. Cooper was not a successful high profile, tennis playing PHD with up to 80 Titanium patents who decided to hijack a plane in his own backyard.. unmasked. You have found a random guy who resembles the sketch, that is it. You have jumped the gun like everybody does when they get emotionally invested in a suspect. Naive people will react positively and that will feed into your confirmation bias.. step back, challenge your own beliefs and proceed carefully. There is nothing that indicates this guy is Cooper.

Maybe a bus ticket to Chicago would be more successful. It's the same reason you can't get a decent hoagy at Jersey Mike's: no one really wants the job. Ironically, all of the truly qualified candidates are being put to death, or close, when maybe they should be offered jobs.

You brought up having lost an MS Office school edition - it was just a suggestion.

The other reason, is that gun nuts are DUMB. Despite all evidence, they still think this works.

There are other verified titanium alloys found on the tie that he was able to visually confirm, so it stands to reason that given all the other chemicals on the tie (all used in metallurgy) that the titanium-antimony is what it appears to be. The issue is that the spectrum doesn’t really have an image attached to it. It just spits out what the particle is comprised of. So obviously we want to confirm that it actually is a non-commercial grade titanium-antimony particle through visual means. Tom’s microscope is currently missing a part that he is attempting to get fixed. So whenever that is done he will be able to search out these particles and visually confirm them as alloys (or not). If it is confirmed to be a TiSb alloy there are only two places in the United States patent record between 1964-1971 that are confirmed to have been fooling around with TiSb alloys where the Sb went that high. Vordahl’s patent calls for up to 18% Sb, and those 3 particles match that well. It was part of an experiment Vordahl was doing concerning the creation of a metal rolling bar. He got the patent for it but Rem-Cru never did anything with it, so it never reached the commercial market, so it wasn’t anything someone would have come upon in the wild. The only other place that has a TiSb patent is an electronics company called Sprague Electronics. I’m not sure what their use for it was, but it also never entered the commercial market.

Vordahl was very athletic and fits the FBI profile of Cooper being a middle aged man who exercised (a rarity in those days to be sure). Vordahl was a runner way before his time. We have writings of his where he talks about it from the 1960’s. As you know not many people did that back then. He was also a competitive amateur tennis and golf player. In fact, when you deep dive on him many of things you come across are stories or articles where he is competing and often placing or winning these tennis or golf tournaments. He was also into eating organic and all that. I believe one of his patents concerns something to do with organic food development.

Do you know if Tom Kaye is certain that the titanium-antimony particles are an alloy? Has he suggested that there are other possibilities? That was a point of discussion at this site over the last few days. Perhaps it was addressed during the Rem-Cru session last weekend.

The Vordahl presentation was professionally filmed. It will be up on YouTube at some point I think. I happened to be filming Bill Mitchell during his discussion with Ulis when Mitchell pointed to Vordahl and just out of the blue volunteered that Vordahl's facial features seem right and that he does kinda look like him given what vague memory he still has. That made many folks in there sit up a bit because, as we all know, whenever he is shown a suspect photo Bill always has the stock answer of "it's been X number of years, Cooper could walk in the door and I wouldn't recognize him." I was able to have some nice moments with him over the weekend. We had breakfast in the hotel on Saturday and Sunday. We were the early risers so both days we were the first ones there when breakfast opened. So he had breakfast both days with Dave Fudeman and myself. Saturday morning he told us that he felt that the sketches (all of them) seemed too young for his memory of Cooper. He said that all these TV programs have always put forward these commandos and paratroopers and how the FBI always showed him photos of these guys and also of skydiving groups, etc., but he never felt it could be those type guys because that wasn't the vibe Cooper gave off. With me he used the phrase he has used before, stating that he always remembered Cooper as this geeky old man with awful hair. He told me during a break in between panels that the night of the hijacking an FBI agent asked him if he thought he could have won in a fight with Cooper and he told them he absolutely could have. He said Cooper was a good bit smaller than him. I asked Bill if he remembered the drunk cowboy and he said he can't recall the guy wearing a hat, but he does remember this obnoxious drunk on the plane who was several rows in front of him who came back and stood near him for several minutes talking to Tina. So he's pretty obviously remembering the cowboy. He said that when they were in the bus with the FBI agents that this same drunk raised his hand and told one of the agents something like "hey, when can we go? I've got to piss." Oh, and Sunday he gave me his email and asked me to send him my stuff on Vordahl, so that was kinda neat. He also told a story about how he was traveling around the Northeast this past year with his wife and they stopped by at the United 93 memorial in Shanksville. He said he was really saddened by it and I'm not sure if he was crying or what but he said a female Park Ranger walked up and asked if he was OK and he told her "yes, it's just that I was on a hijacked plane a long time ago when I was young and I might could have been killed on it like these people and never had children or grandchildren." He said that she goes "D.B. Cooper hijacking? You're Bill Mitchell right?" So he thought that was wild to be recognized on the other side of the country. RPReplay_Final1668903697.mov

And the Colorado Springs LÊ community has indicated that they won’t enforce the state’s new-ish red flag law. Since the shooter issued a bomb threat last year, it’s likely it would have flagged him. But hey, freedom, and it’s only a bunch of gays Wendy P.

I was there in Muskogee sleeping in my van when I heard a lot of hooting and hollering. I opened the door, looked up and saw a bunch of parachutes. I soon learned they had built the 100 way.

I heard that there have been a few loads flown this fall to 13,000 feet out of a Cessna TU206.

Riggerrob, you are a treasure here. Wendy P.

If your Softie is clean and has minimal wear, you MIGHT convince a local rigger to repack it. Faded harness webbing is often half as strong as when it was new. It all depends upon condition. When I worked at Para-Phernalia (aka. Softie factory) we refused to repack most pilot emergency parachutes more than 20 years old. After 20 years of regular usage, they were usually faded, frayed and filthy. There was also the matter of the earliest Softies being rather crude and subtle improvements had been added over the years. If you rSoftie is only 24 years old, it was made in 1998 after all the major bugs had been worked out of the original patterns. As an aside, I also quit repacking round parachute canopies that were manufactured during the 1980s because to the acid-mesh hassles. Yes, I am familiar with the FAA-approved process (bromocreasol green and tensile testing) for returning them to service, but after testing a thousand or so, I lost interest in the process. When I worked for Butler, we rarely repacked PEPs more than 20 years old because the Southern California desert was harsh on PEPs. National and Pioneer also published retrospective notices telling riggers to not return to service their products more than 15 years old, but that was mainly to ground round canopies suspected of suffering from acid-mesh. When I worked for Square One at Perris Valley, California, loft policy dictated that we not repack parachutes more than 25 years old.

This is dishonest at best. Remove the requirement from the GM pledge and let the chips fall where they may. Derek V

Tried that. A DZO doing AFF without a rating. The RD’s response: “What do you want me to do, take away a rating they don’t have?” Read that again, slowly. Love this! Is not worth the paper it is written on. I have seen every one of those pledges ignored. USPA knows they are being ignored. They can’t or won’t do anything about it. Let’s remove the mandatory membership requirement and see what happens. Maybe the insurance alone will make being an USPA member worth it. Let’s find out. Derek V

I'll admit it, I didn't even know that this info was available. Now that I do, I'll be adding my .02 worth when I feel it's needed. Whether it gets heard, well, let's see. I think this little discussion clearly shows an overall disappointment in some of the decisions being made by the BOD. I, like other's here , Don't feel like the USPA is properly representing the majority of it's members. To hear folks say they wude drop their membership in a heartbeat if they didn't have to have it, it's troubling. I used to be proud to be part of this organization. Had the sticker on all my vehicles and everything. I don't anymore. After the Skyride fiasco, the targeting of Bill Dause and anyone associated with him and the many other bully type tactics I've witnessed, I try to distance myself as far as I can. I simply cannot endorse any organization that does such behavior. I hope that other members of the BOD are listening.....

No, my argument is that USPA does not primarily serve its individual members. The best example is the one you ignore, the GM Aircraft Maintenance program. The next best example is lowering the AFFICC standards in response to the instructor shortage. Not if I want to jump at USPA GM DZ. Not if they want to be sanctioned by the USPA. I want USPA to put their skydiver membership first. You know, the people that are paying them. Derek V

I haven't seen mandatory membership put to a vote yet. I would like to though. Derek V

"The United States Parachute Association (USPA) is a voluntary non-profit membership organization of individuals who enjoy and support the sport of skydiving" "GROUP MEMBER PLEDGE Require introductory or regular individual USPA membership of: 1. all licensed U.S. skydivers (a skydiver is considered a student until licensed) 2. non-resident foreign nationals who do not have proof of membership in their national aeroclub" Hmmm. 'Voluntary' but 'require membership'. Derek V

AOPA doesn't require membership. Their membership voluntarily sends in their membership dues because they feel they get their money's worth. Why can't USPA do the same? Derek V

"Are they worth it?" An individual decision. Room for improvement? No doubt. The decision to yank individual and Group memberships because a few board members don't like their business practices wreaks of bully tactics. Losing in Federal court after that stupid decision and agreeing to settle ONLY if the results stay hidden. Ed Scott's asinine comments to the news after the recent Lodi incident. Yanking all those tandem ratings after issuing them and forcing them to get "re-trained" at an additional cost. Yanking Bill's personal membership, the list goes on and on. For an organization that is suppose to be of and for skydivers, it's acting an awfull lot like a corrupt government

Research the USPA Voluntary Inspection Program (VIP). No one has taken a shot at these; - Why is membership mandatory? - Why did USPA lower the standards to pass the AFFI course? - Why did they create a program that gives the impression they are tracking jump ship mainenance when they actually are not? - Why can't members use USPA as a tool to help determine which DZ's to spend their skydiving dollar? - Why do they promote the myth that a GM DZ is somehow safer than a non GM DZ? Derek V