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Showing content with the highest reputation on 06/07/2025 in all areas

  1. 1 point
    Why would Cooper demand a flight to Mexico with no stops in US. To keep law enforcement off his back. The problem with that theory is "time" becomes a real factor. Anything can happen. The Air Force can even decide to shoot the plane down! Cooper's best strategy for escape is a quick in-and-out before LE can even organise. LE and the pilots wont have time to even know where or when Cooper has bailed! Instinctively Cooper takes that route. Its a good tactical decision. A flight to Mexico with no stops in US may be a strong political stance by a guy with a grudge to express, but it is not a sound tactical escape decision. If Cooper does not know where he is he does have a sense of time, and he can see he is over land. He knows he is somewhere over Washington or Oregon and he can see the lights of cities coming up ahead. By identifying Tacoma from the air he has already told us he knows the geography of Washington. That is a given. The lights he is seeing ahead in the air will give him bearings on the ground. The tactical issue for Cooper is time. Staying two steps ahead of anything LE can do. Cooper's decision to bail NOW has given him time, the most precious asset he needs right now. Cooper jumps and vanishes into history - literally! Cooper has used the opportunities available to him to write a page into the history books. Cooper knows. It is ourselves guessing fifty years later! By that standard Cooper escaped ... and won. Claims of a Bayesian analysis are superfluous. (not real) Cooper is a man with priorities. Escape is a higher priority to Cooper than the money. That's what the bomb is all about. I think Cooper would prefer destruction to being caught. That may be why money was ever found on a sandbar miles from his LZ years later.
  2. 1 point
    My understanding is you are an 8:11 jump person vs an 8:13 type. Is that correct? Either way works for my theory. As soon as he sees BG lights it’s go time. If he saw BG 90 seconds sooner or later has no impact on the overall plan and using the lights of BG. It’s just minutiae. The pilot Ryan talked to was on the FBIs radar right after the jump. They searched his place and gave his wife a hard time. He has been flying this area for over 50 years. I take his input very seriously. He says it’s darkness regarding city lights till BG. BG just happens to be right at the 8:11-8:13 window. The flight simulator we can argue with but it is another data point worth considering. At what point did Cooper get the stairs down? Isn’t it around 8:05 when he answers the interphone and says hi to Tina and that everything is now good? That’s the set up. He was preparing after 20 minutes of waiting. It was just before go time. This is part of why having a short flight is beneficial. Cooper can track his location better. I disagree about Reno. I don’t think Cooper had any intention of being on the plane then. But while he is negotiating he is sitting on the runway in Seattle with the aft stairs closed. He wanted Mexico, but he’ll take anything south. Why not pick podunk over major metro if you’re Cooper? Give yourself another option if everything fails. The fact he didn’t argue much about the stairs being up or down or which airport to refuel at indicates to me he only tangential cared. LA? No thanks. Huge…tons of cops. Reno, sure. Less cops. Whatever. It’s south and that’s the point. His plan was to be gone by Portland. He’s just giving himself an option if his plan fails, he is nonchalant relatively speaking because it’s the backup option. If you are right and Cooper just wanted to get out of the US -he knew roughly the flight distance of a 727, he didn’t ask to go to Brazil- then why ask for the dirty configuration at all in Seattle? Wouldn’t the best option be to tell them to fly as fast as possible to Mexico and not ask for drag flaps/10k ft/landing gear down? And if that was a mistake, he wanted it later, why wouldn’t he bitch about the stops? He knew the plane under normal conditions could make it to Mexico. If that’s his destination why not just get there ASAP? IMO Cooper wanted south over Portland. He gave instructions that would take him south and have the plane in a configuration to jump. He has only two needs, he achieved both. It worked. As for the 120 mile wide path…Cooper set conditions that wedge them in on the east with the mountains. If the plane had gone west to the coast he would have told them to go back and try again. There is nothing on the coast that works for Cooper, it’s all terrible for him. He would not want the coast and wouldn’t put up with it. Why would he? It makes no sense for a guy looking to jump. Of all three other directions West is the worst for jumping. My theory is he kept it simple. Select a short flight. Go from one metro to the next, without other metros to confuse you. Learn the key indicators (BG/I-5 lights). Know the terrain from the air and ground. Jump before the metro lights. Simple. Can’t mess it up. Hell, any one of us could pick the spot between BG and Portland from the air at night knowing what we do now. We can tell the distance/time/lights, so could he. That’s all he needed. As for a vehicle or accomplice…not needed. Any good car thief can get away regardless of where he lands. Cooper only needed good terrain to land in. Once he is on the ground he is almost certainly armed and dangerous and will take the first viable vehicle and flee. Cooper thinks they are looking from Seattle to Reno, the night before Thanksgiving. He has time to steal a vehicle and make 100 miles before anyone notices.
  3. 1 point
    In her 302 she indicates that he was still messing around with the bag AFTER they took off. If his goal was to jump immediately one would think he'd have been totally ready to go.
  4. 1 point
    of course it's speculation. Literally everything you're suggesting about him being spooked about Reno is speculation as well. None of us know what was in Cooper's mind.
  5. 1 point
    Hey, I quit well before I was required to. Good decision on my part. Thought you might appreciate this pic of the President of the European Central Bank with some guy,
  6. 1 point
    They won’t go. Old people never know when it’s time to quit. Like when they were shutting down DZ.com, for example.
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