olemisscub

It's quite common indeed. This is expected since Cooper is a very limited topic. Everything he said, which isn't much, has been dissected six ways to Sunday over the years by nerds like us.

but how are those alternatives helpful to the case when we can't possibly know which alternative is correct and both are equally valid? We're all in agreement that Cooper wasn't a recreational skydiver, so how do these two equally valid alternatives for why he didn't request better parachutes help us aside from them both providing additional evidence that he wasn't a rec skydiver?

Don't mistake my tone here, but I just don't think this is a question we as researchers could ever possibly know the answer to, so I'm not sure what the utility is for dwelling on it as much as you have. To me it'd be like a researcher fixating on why he chose 7-up instead of Coke as a mixer. We don't know who Cooper was so we can't even begin to come up with an answer to these sorts of questions that require us to completely dive into his mind.

Wait, you are saying VS? I thought you were just asking in general if jumpers would take the risk of jumping with a bailout rig. OF COURSE he would choose the better gear if given the option. I mean...duh.

I feel like this has been asked and answered. The answer being that Cooper wasn't a skydiver nor was he some Braden-esque military parachutist. He was likely someone who had frequently worn parachutes in the military, either as a paratrooper or as a pilot/air crewman.

Mike Davis has said he would do the Cooper jump with an NB-6 if he knew it was recently packed by a certified rigger.

The problem is we can't possibly ever know which of those two options is correct, and there is nothing to sway us one way or the other, so to have the answer we would literally have to be in Cooper's mind, which obviously we can't do. So I don't see this particular line of inquiry to be helpful. For me, the only aspect of Cooper's parachuting acumen that we can have reasonable confidence in knowing is the belief that he was NOT a recreational skydiver of any sort. We know how the skydiver copycats behaved and we know how the non-skydiver copycats behaved. There is little doubt that his behavior falls in line with the latter category. On a sliding scale of "parachuting know-how" among all of the parajackers, Cooper seems to fall in the middle. Yet the main reasons I place him in the middle of the road, aside from Tina saying he seemed comfortable putting it on, really come from one source: Tosaw. He is our ONLY source for Cooper complaining about D-rings and him looking at packing cards, which are the two things that really elevate him above the McNally's and Fisher's of the world. As I've said numerous times, I would lean toward Tosaw getting that from Tina back when her memory was closer to the event than it certainly is now. Additionally, Tosaw was of the belief that Cooper was foolish and got himself killed. It doesn't benefit the narrative of his book to give Cooper enough parachuting knowledge to know what D-rings were and to know what packing cards were. So I would lean toward him not making that up. The packing cards especially would be a bizarre detail to invent for Tosaw. However, there have to be some slight embellishments or artistic licenses found within Tosaw's narrative. That's just the reality you face when writing a vivid narrative like he did. So might him bitching about the D-rings be one of those? Regardless, as I said, the only thing we can be reasonably confident in given the case evidence and comparative evidence with the other parajackers is that Cooper would have gone about things differently if he was a rec skydiver.

Yes I don't actually know what my Air Force pack is called. I have two NB-6's. Those are neatly labeled on the packs. When I'm back at my office I'll have to check and see what the AF backpack says but I don't think it actually has a name listed on it. Meltzer believes they were called B-4's, but googling that doesn't check out.

Yes, Gryder's rig is a SPORTERIZED Air Force BAILOUT rig. I literally own one just like it. Came in handy when I had to do my videos showing the difference between Air Force and Navy backpacks. To the best of my knowledge, and you've been unable to prove me wrong with visual evidence, there were NO factory supplied non-modified military "mains" that had D-rings from that era that weren't paratrooper packs. Any freefall rigs used by the military that had D-rings and Capewells were just modified BAILOUT backpacks. So when you're saying that Hahneman got a "military parachute", that's just a description of what Gryder "found" or what I have. It's a description of what Mark made his first 100 or so jumps with: a SPORTERIZED military bailout backpack. You keep talking about military mains, but I've never seen you supply any evidence of what you're talking about. I'm glad to be proven wrong on this. So please show me a non-sporterized factory delivered military "main" i.e. a military freefall backpack that came factory delivered differently than a bailout rig.

Of course I know the difference between a bailout rig and a "main" recreational backpack from that era like a Para Commander. My concern and confusion is that I don't know what you're referring to when you were discussing military "mains". You've still not provided an example of what a "main" would be to your average mid-century military man aside from a paratrooper's backpack. Even the highly specialized parachutists doing early HALO jumps were jumping with B4 Air Force bailout backpacks, the only real difference being that they had harnesses equipped with D-rings.

You’ve been on this bailout rig thing for some time now. What’s your takeaway from it? What are you suggesting that this tells us about him?

He seemed totally indifferent to what parachutes he was going to be given, otherwise he’d have been more specific beyond just describing in broad terms what he wanted when he said fronts and backs. I’ve used the analogy many times and I’ll stick with it. Cooper essentially asked for a truck and a trailer. He could have specified a Ford F-150 or a Chevy Silverado, but he didn’t. “Truck and a trailer” is as generic as “front and back”. You’re simply describing in the most general terms what you want. So they delivered Cooper a truck and a trailer but the truck had no trailer hitch. He bitches briefly about the lack of a trailer hitch but never bitched about the generic truck they gave him. As Chilton just said, this indicates that he didn’t care what type of truck they gave him or didn’t know trucks well enough to specify in the first place.

Tried to seek clarification from the guy who spent his career working on 727’s. It sounds like the alarm trigger is not tied to the lever but to the locking mechanism, but it really doesn’t make a difference what it’s really technically tied to though because it’s all pretty much simultaneous, so it may as well be the lever. This is what he wrote: “Moving the handle is not the reason the light comes on. When the stairs are up and you move the handle to the “Open” position, it causes the 2 stair locks to “snap” the locks to the open position thus allowing the stairs to begin lowering. If the stairs were closed and you move the handle open/closed etc. it would only snap unlocked in that configuration. The light comes on simultaneously to the initial movement of the handle because the unlocking mechanism is commanding the door to initiate opening.”

I believe you’re right. I was speaking to a 727 mechanic about it and I misunderstood what he was saying. I believed him to be saying that the sensor which triggered that indicator was on the actual stairs itself, meaning that if the stairs were unlocked and began to move (not down) it would light up. But it’s indeed connected to the lever. He believes the lever would probably need to be moved about 50% to trigger that it has been unlocked.

Most all of them were unemployed layabouts. Heady had only been back from Vietnam for about 2 weeks. He was still shell shocked and did it on a PTSD bender on a whim. Mac was unemployed as well. Already a felon his work prospects weren’t great. McCoy wasn’t a teacher btw. He was a full time student with a tiny GI Bill stipend. His wife was the breadwinner. You’re thinking of McCoy being a Sunday school teacher. LaPoint was a layabout H was an electrician by trade. Fisher was a house painter when he wasn’t committing frauds Francis Goodell was active military. Helicopter crew in Vietnam. Had recently returned from a tour there and was AWOL from Fort Riley. Everett Holt was a part-time student at Indiana University and part-time postal worker. Stanley Speck was a cab driver Frank Sibley was a former airline pilot and MAY have flown with Air America (still trying to confirm that) Billy Hurst was a real life Pvt Pyle and was drummed out of the Marine Corps for being too fat. Unemployed at the time. Merlyn St. George was unemployed, but had been an insurance salesman Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow were both selling weed for income Michael Green worked in a parking garage

There are so few sources that I can’t imagine it falls into the “somewhat regularly” category. Most of the entires on Newspapers are reprints of the same article from 1945 and 1927. So it’s really one article from 27, one from 45, and another from 1958. Three appearances in the history of scanned newspapers can’t be a somewhat regularly used phrase. Even “circulated u.s. currency” only shows up in about a dozen unique articles. So that’s weird itself.

Looks like I missed a few. Regardless, it's not remotely a common phrase, so either someone brain farted during the game of telephone or Cooper was just trying to sound smart by using big words. It almost reminds me of one of the aliens in Men In Black when they are inhabiting human bodies and trying to speak like what they think earthlings sound like. "Greetings friend, I would like to withdraw negotiable American currency from my bank account."

My key issue with this theory has always been this: if he originally wanted to jump in Mexico, then why not hijack somewhere closer to Mexico? He was literally as far away as he could get from Mexico.

I would think Cooper saying it would actually benefit your suspect. H was weird as shit. This guy asked for $500’s and $1,000’s. Cooper saying something like “negotiable American currency” works well for him. I’m being serious

Jeez, aside from Cooper articles, that phrase appears a grand total of ONE time on its own on Newspapers. Some dude in 1927.

Alice? I can’t roll with you on this one. 22 year old Tina Anne Mucklow from Philly is going to turn circulated into negotiable? Man, that’s hard to figure. Also, aside from her being unlikely to brain fart circulated into negotiable, she was sitting next to a guy with a bomb. I imagine she was being quite careful to communicate his demands verbatim. I mean, the guy was sitting right next to her. IF there is an error in the game of telephone here, it’s more likely that Rat is the culprit than Tina. We do know for a fact that Rat said that over the radio, so the greater likelihood to me is that Flo was writing Rat’s brain fart, not Tina’s. I’ll stick with Cooper being weird and saying it for some weird reason.

Perhaps he was just trying to appear overly formal and intelligent so as to be taken more seriously, distancing himself from the typical desperate criminal.

There is absolutely zero chance they'd have shown up with Canadian dollars during NORJAK if he had just said "I want $200,000 dollars by 5 p.m." I can't imagine Cooper was thinking like that. You're in America essentially committing a bank robbery. 100 times out of 100 the money is going to show up in American dollars. The fact that he asked for "negotiable currency" is even weirder than specifying U.S. or American. And that really does seem to be what he said. Flo wrote it in her notes. What kind of weirdo talks like that?

I’m with you on the drag. Not sure how significant it would be but surely it would act as a speed brake of some sort.

Anything is possible if there isn’t demonstrable evidence showing otherwise. So you can put me in the “exceedingly skeptical but open to the possibility” category when it comes to all things Gunther haha. I was indeed fully convinced that the entire thing was performance art from Max until the 302 dropped. That certainly changed things.