Orange1

I've only done about 15 jumps out of porters, all 4-way, and never had a problem with stability on exit. Assuming yours is the same as the ones I've jumped, the run-in speed is pretty slow and there is a lot of "dead air" as you exit - maybe that is what is hampering you? We pretty much just dropped off the plane, as opposed to aggressively launching out of it. As an inexperienced 4-way on a plane we weren't used to, it took a few jumps before we could fly the hill properly though. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

You don't know that. You can't find the reason for commutation. You seem to think that's sinister; I don't find it odd that records are lost 40 years after the fact, especially from days when they were kept on paper. Interesting coincidence. There have been many interesting coincidences in the history of the world. Some mean something, many others don't, and yet more are cunningly used to form the basis of a number of conspiracy theories going around the world. Someone calls someone just afer he is released from prison? Seems pretty normal to me. I bet there are many people who have called criminals about various things in advance of the crimes that were to be committed with no knowledge of them. That is all of course assuming you believe Ray was the assassin in the first place.... given all the "evidence" he wasn't (I am no expert and take no stand on whether he was or not) Anyway, MLK's family has already taken the US government to court over the alleged conspiracy (it has been pointed out that the burden of proof is a lot less in civil case than a criminal one). It's hardly "secret". The story behind that is well documented. None of it mentioned a Weber or a Collins or a Cooper and the rifle is apparently at the bottom of the Mississippi. As to what frightened Duane - who the heck knows? But does it make sense that he would then resuscitate an old ID that according to you was the same he had used and therefore would clearly identify him to, rather than hide him from, the people you claim he was so frightened of that he had to buy a gun? That makes no sense to me (just like committing a daring caper and then not bothering to go back and fetch the very large proceeds of it makes no sense to me). I'm completely confused by your comment about the tie. The initial reports all had Cooper in a tie. Believe me, you are not the only one who feels like you're hitting your head against a brick wall all the time. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

The files that support the Commutation of Sentence have either been purged or never existed. Now, for the CASE file - if that has been purged or is missing I will just have to hit the newpaper archives. I am not beyond spending a few weeks searching the archives for the crime he committed and finding the others involved. I am not beyond searching their past just as I have search Duane's past. The FBI also ignored a man called Roach. Now it is as though he never existed. Why didn't the FBI look at the Commutation of Sentence UNLESS they have known ALL along considering the files supporting it have been purged or never existed. Who were Duane's (John's) buddies in Jefferson - what was their background? Who is Roach? Who is Gunn? Why was I threatened by someone who knew Duane as John? If the FBI has an explanation of the above they should have shared this with me in the very beginning and have spared me all of the time and money I have spent trying to unravel his past. Jo...again, that is hardly the FBI's job. And these people could have a background as anything. They could be skydivers, but they could also be fishermen, accountants, gamblers, invetment bankers, street sweepers, short order chefs.... once again you're making leaps of logic that the rest of us find a bit hard to fathom. From commutation of sentence (most likely because he was a snitch) to skydiving? I said Duane's story would be a lot more believable if you could put him jumping. That doesn't mean there are other holes in it, or at least things that don't make sense. Why could he travel all over for all sorts of things, apparently lying about where he went yet never get the money? What would have been the reason for keeping potentially damning evidence like the ticket and the money bag...but not more money? Why not leave them with the money? etc etc etc. To be honest i think this commutation etc has been another tangent to go off on that takes you further away from putting Duane in a parachute. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Not sure if I can picture exactly what you mean by a "tuck" but how recoverable any position is is partlly dependent on the jumper's experience. I'll leave it to the jet-experienced guys to answer re time, from a normal plane a jumper leaving in some kind of "balled" position should be able to get stable very quickly, i.e. a matter of a few seconds - but we have also all seen videos of AFF students - with already a few jumps under their belt and theoretically knowing how to arch and get stable - tumbling all over the sky with their AFFIs racing to catch them and only being stabilized by their instructors. This is what panic does to jumpers. I honestly believe that this really is why the question of Cooper's experience comes in. Someone with no experience, sensory overload (it's hard to explain this unless you've been there), tumbling through the sky in the dark, maybe finally getting stable and then finding the ripcord is a hard pull... all this with less than 60 seconds to impact from the time he left the step. (I'm not sure how fast those rounds would have taken to open, maybe a rigger from those days can chip in - what would have been minimum survivable opening altitude? ) Jo, believe me the Duane story would become a lot more believable with some evidence of jump experience. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

It's not attacking like crazy but more to the point it's not "evidence". You might think it has more weight because it has a formula attached, but it still is not enough "evidence" to prove anything. Right now, it is not "fact" or "truth" as relates to DB Cooper in anyting but a hypothetical way. Call it educated conjecture if you will, it is certainly not anything a real FBI agent, for example, would label "evidence". Useful in trying to find evidence or facts or truth, perhaps, but that is something else. You however clearly - your own words - consider it fact, evidence, truth. If it actually ends up leading somewhere, I can promise you I will be the first person to congratulate you. If you can't see what your experience or otherwise means.. along with Albert18 calling us crime whuffos... well what are you guys doing here rather than websleuths or those other "real" crime forums? (Wonder how many FBI agents or real detectives hang out on those? Certainly however they are unlikely to be filled with skydivers who have this irritating habit of basing opinions about a jump on their skydiving experience.) Oh and incidentally there are thousands of skdyivers who became extremely proficient at freefall without once visiting a tunnel. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

But points on a sketch of a face can and have changed over time. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

(sigh)...stop getting so aggro and defensive all the time... and just go do a jump, ok? tunnel just does not prepare you at all for exit. then you won't need "whirlwind" to be a "vague description". "whirlwind" is the kind of exit forces where people have for example dislocated arms on exit from jets (like a jumper in WT04 did). i'm not saying the bag did or didn't come loose. but you clearly underestimated what the forces were. as db cooper may well have IF he was not an experienced jumper, as we have seen by various whuffo comments on here. do you have any clue as to what his experience with knots was? you may be convinced on your "evidence" that the bag didn't come loose. i haven't seen enough evidence to convince me either way. incidentally.. on tensile strength. parachute lines can snap if the forces on them are large enough. go search the incidents forum for examples. i seriously doubt the forces would be on a tied-on bag, but a plain assumption that because they are suspension lines they didn't break is not backed up by empirical evidence. as for discounting, you've made enough comments about how your fornulae are superior to everything else, i really don't know what more i can add. can you do me a calculation to show how long it would have taken a novice jumper with sensory overload to stop tumbling through the night and get stable enough to successfully pull a ripcord on a rig with what evidence from the riggers says would have been a very hard pull? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

now - get SERIOUS - you are showing what a "crime whuffo" you are by making jokes out of all this! Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

So, Safe might bash me again in case this was posted and i forgot, but I did a search and couldn't find it... http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/340794_cooper23.html Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

On the flight line being "changed", this is absolutely not something recent as you seem to keep implying. I have seen a number of references in various articles that this was being questioned back to Himmelsbach days. For example: Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Ah, but at least we have a sense of humor. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Yes, Guru's post was brilliant Hmmm.... they were GIVEN the money by a mysterious stranger and told to pretend they found it on the riverbank. For that they got given a whole lot more in un-falling apart bills. The reason was... I dunno, as wacky as any other we've seen posted here about "planting" the money. Actually my first thought on reading ckret's post was that there was a link between the "finders" and Cooper. But I guess we'll just have to wait, and hope that it's not another dead-end like the parachute. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Long detailed conspiracy theory (FBI etc) about MLK assassination. No mention of Duane Weber or John Collins or, indeed, of the rifle being hidden anywhere for any length time.. because apparently some guy called McCraw threw it in the Mississippi River: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/MLKconExp.html#no4 Of course there are plenty other more rational sites out there too Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

What I don't understand is this: If Duane had time to run all over the country doing all sorts of things over a period of many years, why on earth did he never go back and retrieve the money from the bucket in anything resembling a reasonable time given the huge incentive of nearly $200K in 1971 money? That seems a pretty big hole in the argument to me. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Not mad, more frustrated. Because you seem to hang everything on them to the exclusion of anything else. Like you keep on coming back to the match of a sketch despite the fact that it has been pointed out that you are using the software for a purpose for which it was not designed. The discussion about forces on exit is another case in point. You thought it was a "simple mathematical calc". Experienced guys told you otherwise. (You surely could model it, but not the way you did.) I'm just saying... there is more that happens and you don't seem to want to accept that. You spend a lot of time on maths and maps. You don't seem to even want to contemplate that the fact that Cooper may or may not have survived the jump in the first place would probably depend on how experienced or otherwise he was. Sure, if someone really wanted to take the time to model a probability distribution of that it could probably be done, but wouldn't really mean a damn thing at the end of the day because there is no way of knowing if Cooper would be the mean or the fat tail of the distribution. Like Guru I wonder why I bother coming back and checking this when things just go round and round. Especially 2 people who claim to be objective but clearly are anything but. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

happythoughts... there are people for whom experience means nothing compared to formulae written out on pieces of paper, and they are usually so convinced they are right that nothing can change their minds. (the world is littered with examples of them. LTCM is a great one. your storm is probably a 3- or 6-sigma event that just doesn't get captured in their calcs. fwiw your storm story makes a lot of sense to me.) safe, i have read just about every post... as it was posted. however, after between something over 2500 posts spanning a couple of years, there are things i have forgotten. please accept my apologies. i guess it's a bit like jo being convinced she has corrected me on something 3 or 4 times when that is patently not true. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I may have missed this or forgotten it somewhere along the line - has anyone posted a pic of mayfield here? Those composites all look close enough to the original witness sketch that was released as far as i'm concerned - we've had enough posts from people who deal with these things regularly that sketches are very seldom extremely accurate. I for one would like to see a pic of mayfield side by side with any of those sketches. Not sure why things provided by "the Weber people" must be accepted and those provided by "the Mayfield people" should be dismissed. At least not by those with open minds. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Um, if you read the thread you would see it is not correct that in "any attempt to solve the case" we assume it was a novice. The FBI has various reasons they believe it was. Jo etc would like to think it was to support the Duane theory. Others think it was an experienced skydiver or paratrooper (Mayfield, Christiansen, etc). The bottom line is that so far no-one has come up with anything conclusive at all... on anything... so all options are open. Errol has also given various answers; it has also been suggested even an experienced jumper would have chosen a reserve (the NB6 was a pilot emergency rig as I understand) for reliability of opening/packing. I don't have a huge opinion on this, other than if it was a novice I'd put a very small probability on his chances of survival - especially after the commentary of people who would know about how hard a pull it would have been (coupled with tumbling, sensory overload etc before the guy could even start thinking to pull I think a bounce may have been very likely). How long till a no-pull impact from 10K - 60 seconds maybe, less if you're tumbling for most of it? And it may not have been someone with a death wish, just someone who saw footage or whatever of a skydiver and thought "i just got to pull the cord when i jump, how hard can that be?" Like I said before, we've seen from some of the non-jumper comments here that they are clueless about what an exit is actually like, let alone an exit from a jet at night... ya know, if you don't know how scary/dangerous it is,maybe you think it's easy. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I agree it's very possible that if he pulled he lived.... big if. It has occurred to me that in all the discussion about him possibly never have jumped before, I don't think anyone has mentioned the "sensory overload" factor - I know not every new jumper gets it but I think most do... added to that a violent tumbling exit and I think one assumption that definitely needs to be re-examined is that if he had never jumped before, he pulled high. I think he most likely would have been nowhere near in a position to pull - or at least try to pull - before reaching terminal. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Fair enough... what do you think the chances are that a novice /first time jumper would have survived the jump with all the money intact? Especially bearing in mind the posts that have been made that it was probably a hard-pull rig? This is where I keep getting stuck... I don't necessarily think Cooper had any experience, but if he didn't, I can't see much chance of him doing it successfully. We've seen from the posts by non-jumpers here, to provide a very simple example, that they are absolutely clueless about the forces that hit you on exit. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

Yes, but just being a snitch doesn't fit in with the other theories... Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

a past topic here has been assumptions - it would have taken you 5 seconds to check your assumption that i was male. when you bother to show me the courtesy of a correct gender address, i may do the same to you. so philosophizing on the nature of "crime" aside, do you have any new insights to add to this case? Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

when you're done shouting... i had no intention of pulling "innocent individuals" in. you keep on saying you have had to "correct" me more than once, in this instance i would like to see exactly where you have corrected a past post of mine. i mentioned this person once and your only response was to tell me you didn't want to hear anything about it. so bottom line is that you still have not succeeded in what you came here for as per your very first post: to put duane in a parachute. Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

ms novalis, thanks for your response. the antitrust was a side issue, semantics about what is "criminal" was something else, and completely irrelevant imho to this discussion. this thread may be about a crime, but it only exists on these boards because it involved someone using a parachute to commit that crime (a crime which by the way is undisputed as "criminal" in anyone's language). in that context let's not forget that the only real suspects that have been put in parachutes are mccoy (dismissed on alibi), christiansen (dismissed on physical description) and mayfield (i'm still not entirely sure why he has been dismissed to be honest). as bozo has reminded us, no-one has put weber anywhere near a parachute (the closest we got was someone he knew, maybe, who skydived, but when we tried to explore that avenue jo shut us down and told us she didn't want to hear anymore about it, somehow being in miami in 1962 seems to make him more of a suspect than someone who had a clue about how to survive a night jump). Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.

I think an exposition of monopolistic pricing power, and an associated debate on how "criminal" it is, is taking thread drift a little too far (btw you may not have noticed but antitrust legislation came into play somewhere between clarence darrow and db cooper) Skydiving: wasting fossil fuels just for fun.