The Last Flight: Inside the Mind of D.B. Cooper’s Co-Pilot

The Last Flight: Inside the Mind of D.B. Cooper’s Co-Pilot

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The Last Flight: Inside the Mind of D.B. Cooper’s Co-Pilot

The co-pilot who felt the plane shudder when America’s most infamous hijacker jumped into history has died, taking his front-row memories of the only unsolved skyjacking to his grave.

William Rataczak died from pneumonia on October 22, 2025, at an assisted living facility in North Oaks, Minnesota. He was 86 years old. Most people who read his obituary weren’t interested in how he died. They wanted to know about one specific night in 1971 when he was the co-pilot of a Boeing 727 that got hijacked by a man who would become the most famous unsolved criminal in American aviation history.
Rataczak was 32 years old that night, in his sixth year working for Northwest Orient Airlines, a former Air Force pilot who’d spent his career preparing for emergencies. Nothing prepared him for what happened on November 24, 1971.

The Day Flying Stopped Being a Lark

Thanksgiving Eve 1971 started like any other Pacific Northwest November day. Rain came down in sheets at Portland International Airport. Passengers getting ready to board Northwest Orient Flight 305 hunched under umbrellas as they walked across the tarmac and climbed the aft stairs of the Boeing 727-100. This was supposed to be a routine 30-minute hop to Seattle. Rataczak settled into the co-pilot’s seat next to Captain William Scott. Harold Anderson took his position as flight engineer. The three flight attendants – Alice Hancock, Tina Mucklow, and Florence Schaffner – moved through their pre-flight routines.
Flying in 1971 worked completely differently than it does today. Airport security didn’t really exist. There were no metal detectors at the entrances. No X-ray machines scanning bags. Passengers could walk straight to their gates carrying whatever they wanted. And this created a rather bizarre situation: hijackings became almost commonplace. Between 1968 and 1972, criminals hijacked 159 American aircraft. That’s more than three hijackings per month for four straight years.
Most of these hijackers wanted the same thing – a free ride to Cuba. Pilots and crew started calling them “take me to Havana” jobs. The whole thing became so routine that passengers sometimes treated these diversions like unexpected adventures. Rataczak himself described how it usually went: the plane would land in Cuba, Cuban officials would welcome the hijacker, and then everyone else would get bottles of rum and Cuban cigars before climbing back on the plane to fly home. Passengers actually thought it was kind of fun. A 1968 issue of Time magazine even published a tongue-in-cheek guide called “What to do if the hijacker comes,” offering readers advice on unexpected Cuban vacations.
The reality for the hijackers was less pleasant. Many of them had romantic ideas about being welcomed to Castro’s Cuba with open arms. Instead, they were often jailed or tortured. But the public didn’t know much about that part.
So when Flight 305 took off that rainy evening with 36 passengers and a crew of six, nobody was particularly worried about hijackers. The man sitting in seat 18-E – the very last row of the plane – looked unremarkable enough. He wore a dark business suit and sunglasses. He carried a briefcase. He’d paid $20 cash for his one-way ticket to Seattle, writing his name on the boarding pass in red ink and block letters: Dan Cooper.

The Note

The plane taxied down the runway and lifted off. Everything seemed normal. Then, shortly after takeoff, Cooper handed a note to Florence Schaffner. She glanced at it and tucked it in her pocket without really reading it. Flight attendants dealt with this kind of thing constantly – male passengers hitting on them, slipping them notes with phone numbers, making awkward advances. She figured this was just more of the same.
Cooper leaned forward. His voice was calm. “Miss, I want you to read that note. Read it now.”
She pulled it back out and read it. The note said he had a bomb.
Schaffner looked at him, probably hoping this was some kind of joke. “You’re kidding.”
He told her he wasn’t kidding at all.
She took the note to Tina Mucklow, the other flight attendant. Mucklow picked up the interphone and called the cockpit. “We are being hijacked. This is no joke.”
Cooper opened his briefcase just enough for the flight attendants to see inside. There were red cylinders in there, connected to wires and a battery. Then he closed it and laid out exactly what he wanted. He’d clearly thought this through. He wanted $200,000 in cash. He wanted four parachutes – and he was specific about this: two front parachutes and two back parachutes. He told them “no funny stuff.” He also said he wanted fuel trucks ready when they landed in Seattle.
Schaffner grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down everything he said. Then she carried his demands to the cockpit.
Rataczak heard what she was saying and his brain struggled to process it. “What do we do now?” he remembered thinking. “Is this really happening to us?”
The crew had trained for hijackings, sort of. But those training scenarios involved hijackers who wanted to go to Cuba. This was different. This hijacker wanted money. That hadn’t really happened before.

Circling in the Dark

The crew radioed airline officials and contacted air traffic control. They explained the situation. Then Flight 305 kept flying toward Seattle, but once they got there, they didn’t land. Instead, the plane began tracing wide circles over Puget Sound. They needed time. Someone had to gather $200,000 in twenty-dollar bills with recorded serial numbers. Someone else had to track down four parachutes. And everyone involved needed to figure out what the hell they were supposed to do next. For two hours, that Boeing 727 circled in the rainy Northwest darkness while the passengers sat in their seats wondering why the crew kept telling them they had a minor mechanical problem.
Back in the cabin, Cooper sat in seat 18-E acting like he had all the time in the world. Tina Mucklow was sitting next to him now, acting as the go-between for Cooper and the cockpit. He smoked cigarettes, one after another, carefully placing each butt in the ashtray. Those cigarette butts would become one of the most frustrating details of the entire investigation. Years later, when DNA testing technology became available, investigators wanted to test them. But they were gone. Someone had either thrown them away or lost them. Nobody knows which.
At some point during those two hours, Mucklow tried to understand him a little better. She asked if he had some kind of grudge against Northwest Orient Airlines. Maybe he was a disgruntled employee or a passenger who’d had a bad experience.
Cooper told her no. He didn’t have a grudge against the airline. “I just have a grudge,” he said. He didn’t elaborate on what that grudge was or who it was against.
Up in the cockpit, Rataczak kept thinking about those four parachutes. Why did Cooper want four? There were three of them flying the plane – the captain, the co-pilot, and the flight engineer. The math was simple and absolutely terrifying. Was Cooper planning to force them to engage the autopilot and jump out of the plane with him? Was this hijacking actually a mass murder-suicide? “That was one of the times when we got really concerned,” Rataczak remembered later.
The crew also had to process another unsettling detail. Cooper knew things about aviation. The way he phrased his demands, the specific requests he made – this wasn’t some random guy who’d watched a movie and decided to hijack a plane. He understood how aircraft worked.

The Exchange

Flight 305 finally landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The passengers filed off, still completely unaware they’d just been part of a hijacking. Every other plane in Seattle’s airspace had been diverted. That Boeing 727 sat alone on the tarmac under the lights.
FBI agents arrived. So did employees from Seattle First National Bank, carrying a canvas bag that weighed 19 pounds and measured 11 inches by 12 inches by 6.5 inches. Inside were 10,000 twenty-dollar bills. Every single serial number had been recorded. Four parachutes showed up as well.
Cooper let the other flight attendants leave, but he ordered Mucklow to stay. Then he told the pilots he wanted to go to Mexico. His aviation knowledge really showed in what he said next. He didn’t just say “fly to Mexico.” He gave them very specific instructions about how he wanted them to fly.
He wanted the plane at 10,000 feet. Not higher, not lower. He wanted them flying relatively slow, around 196 miles per hour. He wanted the cabin unpressurized. And he specified 15-degree flap settings. These weren’t random numbers. These specifications revealed that Cooper understood exactly what the Boeing 727 could do.
Most commercial jets can’t maintain slow, low-altitude flight without stalling. The 727 could. The flap setting Cooper requested would let him control the plane’s airspeed and altitude from back in the cabin without ever having to go into the cockpit, where three pilots could have jumped him and ended this whole thing. He’d thought about that.
And there was something else Cooper knew, something that most people didn’t. The Boeing 727 had a feature that was both secret and unique: the aft airstair could be operated while the plane was flying. And the switch that controlled it was in the rear of the cabin, not in the cockpit. The pilots couldn’t override it. They couldn’t stop him from opening those stairs mid-flight even if they wanted to.
Before they took off again, Cooper told them to lower the rear stairs. Northwest’s home office got on the radio and objected. They said it wasn’t safe to take off with the stairs down. Cooper’s response was short: “It can be done, do it.” He didn’t argue about it though. He said he’d be fine lowering the stairs himself once they were in the air. He also asked for food to be brought to the plane for the crew members he was keeping hostage.
Captain Scott and co-pilot Rataczak had a chance to escape during all this. There was an emergency rope ladder in the cockpit. While the plane sat on the ground in Seattle, they could have easily climbed down and gotten away. They didn’t. They chose to stay with the plane and their remaining crew member.

The Pressure Bump

At around 7:40 p.m. on November 24, 1971, Flight 305 took off from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for the second time that night. Two F-106 fighter jets and a T-33 trainer followed behind at a safe distance. They were flying in S-patterns, staying back far enough that Cooper wouldn’t see them if he looked out a window.
Shortly after takeoff, Cooper told Tina Mucklow to go up to the cockpit and stay there. She did. Now Cooper was completely alone in the cabin with $200,000 in cash, four parachutes, and whatever his plan was.
He took out a knife and cut open one of the parachutes. He needed the pink nylon rope inside because he had to figure out a way to secure all that money. Twenty-dollar bills are light individually, but 10,000 of them in a canvas bag gets heavy and awkward fast. Cooper cut lengths of the rope and used them to wrap the bills into a tight bundle. He made handles from other sections of the rope so he could carry it.
At approximately 8:13 p.m., Rataczak felt something happen. The tail section of the plane suddenly pitched upward. It was a significant movement, enough that the pilots had to actively trim the aircraft to get it back to level flight. They were flying somewhere near the suburbs north of Portland at the time. The aft cabin door was wide open. The staircase was deployed. And nobody in the cockpit could see what was happening back there. They were flying blind in more ways than one.
Rataczak got on the radio to air traffic control. He chose his words carefully, keeping his voice measured and professional. “I think our friend has just taken leave of us.”
Cooper had jumped. The man in the business suit had opened that rear staircase, taken his bundle of cash, and stepped out into a November storm at 10,000 feet. The temperature at that altitude created a wind chill of 70 degrees below zero. He was wearing a business suit and loafers. The plane was traveling at 196 miles per hour. Below him was heavily forested wilderness in southwestern Washington, dark and rugged and remote.
Flight 305 kept going, heading for its scheduled refueling stop in Reno, Nevada. When the plane touched down at Reno-Tahoe International Airport at 11:02 p.m., law enforcement had already surrounded the area. FBI agents, state troopers, sheriff’s deputies, Reno police – they were all there, establishing a perimeter around the aircraft. Nobody approached the plane right away though. They were afraid the hijacker might still be on board with his bomb. They had no way of knowing if he’d actually jumped or if that pressure change had been something else.
Captain Scott went back into the cabin and searched it. Cooper was gone. The money was gone. Two of the four parachutes were gone. Two parachutes remained on the plane, including the one Cooper had cut open to get the nylon rope.

The Legend Begins

The story hit newspapers around the world almost immediately. And right from the start, there was a mistake that became permanent. A reporter somewhere misidentified “Dan Cooper” as “D.B. Cooper.” Nobody knows exactly how it happened or who did it first. But once that name got into print, it stuck. The error became inseparable from the legend.
People descended on the rolling foothills of the Cascade Mountains in Washington, where investigators figured Cooper must have landed. Some of them were searching for the man himself, thinking maybe they’d find him injured or dead in the forest. Others had a different goal – they wanted to find the money. They imagined bundles of twenty-dollar bills scattered across the wilderness, free for the taking. Law enforcement didn’t find Cooper. They didn’t find the money either.
The public reaction was strange. A lot of people seemed to admire what Cooper had done. “You can’t help but admire the guy,” one sheriff’s deputy told United Press International. A man interviewed by television reporters called him “one of the slickest cats to ever walk on the face of the Earth.” There was this weird folk hero quality to the whole thing. He hadn’t hurt anyone. He’d been polite. He’d pulled off something audacious and then disappeared into thin air.
The FBI launched a massive investigation. They ran experiments to figure out exactly when and where Cooper had jumped. They took the same model Boeing 727, configured it exactly the way Flight 305 had been configured that night, and pushed a 200-pound sled out of the open aft staircase. The sled created the same upward tail motion and the same brief cabin pressure change that the flight crew had experienced at 8:13 p.m. This confirmed the timing. Based on the plane’s speed and heading at that moment, they calculated that Cooper had probably jumped somewhere near the southernmost outreach of Mount St. Helens, a few miles southeast of Ariel, Washington, near Lake Merwin.
Twelve days after the hijacking, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover authorized the use of an Air Force SR-71 Blackbird – one of the fastest, most advanced reconnaissance planes ever built – to retrace Flight 305’s path and photograph the terrain below. The SR-71 made five separate flights. The weather didn’t cooperate. Visibility was terrible. The photographs didn’t show anything useful.
The FBI collected fingerprints from items Cooper had touched during the hijacking. They interviewed witnesses. They created composite sketches based on descriptions from the flight crew and passengers. They questioned suspects. Years went by. Nothing broke the case open.

The Boy and the Money

On February 10, 1980 – nine years after the hijacking – an eight-year-old boy named Brian Ingram was having a picnic with his parents along the Columbia River. They were at a spot called Tena Bar in Clark County, Washington, about nine miles downstream from Vancouver. It was a Sunday. The family was planning to roast hot dogs and enjoy the day.
Brian’s dad was getting ready to build a campfire. Brian knelt down in the sand to smooth it out, make it flat so his dad could arrange the wood. He brushed his hand across the sand and felt something. It didn’t feel like sand. It felt like old, wet newspaper.
He started digging. His five-year-old cousin Denise helped him. They used sticks to excavate whatever was buried there. What came out of the sand were three bundles of twenty-dollar bills, still bound together with rubber bands. The bills were severely deteriorated, almost falling apart from moisture and time. Brian’s father looked at them and thought they had to be counterfeit. Why else would someone bury money on a riverbank?
Two of the bundles contained 100 bills each. The third bundle had 90 bills. The total came to $5,800. The family put the crumbling bills in a plastic bread bag and kept them. They talked about it during their picnic. Someone mentioned it could possibly be D.B. Cooper’s money, but it seemed like such a wild idea that they mostly dismissed it and went on eating hot dogs and watching boats go by on the river.
Later, the family contacted local police and read off some of the serial numbers from the bills that were still legible. Those serial numbers matched. These were bills from the ransom given to D.B. Cooper on November 24, 1971. After nine years, someone had finally found a piece of the evidence everyone had been looking for.
The FBI took custody of the money and subjected it to extensive analysis. Where had it been for nine years? How did it get to Tena Bar? Why were three separate bundles buried together in the sand instead of scattered across miles of wilderness? The bills were decomposed, but not as badly as you’d expect if they’d been sitting in a river for nine full years. Their condition suggested a more complicated timeline.
After years of legal negotiations, a court divided the recovered money in 1986. Brian Ingram got to keep almost $3,000 worth. Northwest Orient’s insurance company got a portion. The FBI retained 14 bills as evidence. By that time, most of the bills had deteriorated so badly that they were only valuable as souvenirs from one of America’s most famous unsolved crimes. Ingram kept his share in a photo album for decades before eventually selling 15 of the bills at auction in 2008. They brought in about $37,000 from collectors.
The discovery at Tena Bar created more questions than it answered. The location was roughly 20 miles away from Ariel, Washington, where the FBI’s original drop zone analysis said Cooper had jumped. How did the money travel 20 miles? How did three loose bundles stay together for years and then end up buried in the same spot? Why were they buried in sand rather than scattered across the landscape or caught in tree branches?
Theories multiplied. Maybe Cooper’s jump had scattered his belongings, and the money fell into the Washougal River, which eventually flows into the Columbia River, which could have carried the bundles downstream to Tena Bar. Maybe the FBI’s flight path calculations were wrong and Cooper had actually jumped much closer to Tena Bar than they thought. Maybe Cooper survived the jump, buried the money on Tena Bar for some reason, and then couldn’t come back to retrieve it. Maybe Cooper had an accomplice who buried it there deliberately to throw investigators off the trail.
In 1974 – three years after the hijacking but before the money was found – the Columbia River had been dredged and sand was deposited on Tena Bar. This timing detail complicated every theory about how and when the money got there.
Nobody knows the answer. The remaining $194,200 has never been found. Not a single additional twenty-dollar bill from that ransom has ever turned up. Not in circulation, not buried somewhere else, not in anyone’s possession. Three bundles containing $5,800 is all that’s ever been recovered from $200,000 in marked bills.

A Life After History

William John Rataczak was born on June 30, 1939, in Minneapolis. His father, John Rataczak, worked as a mechanic for Northwest Orient Airlines, which probably explains where William’s love of aircraft came from. Growing up, he was completely obsessed with planes. He got a job at a grocery store while he was still in school. Every dollar he made went toward the same goal: flying lessons.
He earned his pilot’s license before he was old enough to get his driver’s license. Most teenagers are desperate to drive a car. Rataczak had already moved on to piloting aircraft.
After spending a year at the University of Minnesota, he joined the Air Force. When his service ended, he went back to the university and finished his bachelor’s degree in 1966. That same year, Northwest Orient Airlines hired him. He stayed with the airline until he retired in 1999, more than three decades of flying.
Rataczak married Judith Burgess. They had three children together: Michael, James, and Sarah. Judith died in 2022. At the time of William’s death in 2025, he had eight grandchildren and one great-granddaughter. He’s also survived by his sister Katherine Bensen and his brothers David and Scott Rataczak.
The hijacking became the defining moment of Rataczak’s professional life, even though he had no control over it. History just happened to be sitting in seat 18-E on a flight he was assigned to work. Over the years, he gave interviews and speeches about that night. He appeared on the BBC podcast “Witness History” in 2015. He spoke at the Northwest Airlines History Center in 2012. He answered questions about Cooper with the kind of careful precision you’d expect from someone who knew that amateur detectives, conspiracy theorists, and true crime enthusiasts would analyze every single word he said.
Rataczak had his own theory about what happened to the man in the business suit who jumped out of his plane that night.
“My mind tells me he’s dead,” he told The Associated Press after he retired. “And my heart tells me I hope he is, because he caused a great number of people a great deal of grief.”

The Investigation Closes

The FBI worked the D.B. Cooper case for 45 years. That’s an extraordinary amount of time and resources dedicated to a single unsolved crime. Investigators interviewed dozens of suspects over the decades. People kept coming forward with theories, with deathbed confessions, with stories about relatives or acquaintances who suddenly had unexplained wealth in late 1971. In 2011, someone claimed to have found a parachute in the Pacific Northwest that might have belonged to Cooper. The FBI analyzed it. They couldn’t definitively link it to the hijacking.
In July 2016, the FBI made an announcement. They were no longer actively investigating the case. The agency would still preserve all the evidence they’d collected. If someone brought them physical evidence – something concrete that could be tested and verified – they’d review it. But they weren’t going to chase down tips anymore. They weren’t going to interview new suspects. After 45 years, they were stepping back.
The FBI released a statement explaining their decision. “The tips have conveyed plausible theories, descriptive information about individuals potentially matching the hijacker, and anecdotes – to include accounts of sudden, unexplained wealth. Although the FBI appreciated the immense number of tips provided by members of the public, none to date have resulted in a definitive identification of the hijacker.”
D.B. Cooper remains the only unsolved case of air piracy in American history. That’s a remarkable distinction. Every other hijacking, every other skyjacking, every other person who tried something similar – they were all either caught, killed, or identified. Cooper is the exception. The only one who got away.
The hijacking changed aviation security permanently. In 1973, metal detectors and mandatory searches of carry-on luggage became standard procedures at American airports. The era of just walking onto a plane carrying whatever you wanted ended. Boeing also modified all their 727 aircraft with something called a Cooper vane – a mechanical device that physically prevents the aft stairs from being lowered while the plane is in flight. The feature that Cooper had exploited, that secret capability that let him escape, was eliminated.
Cooper inspired an entire cultural phenomenon. Books have been written analyzing every detail of the case. Movies have dramatized the hijacking. Songs reference him. There are annual D.B. Cooper festivals in the Pacific Northwest where enthusiasts gather to discuss theories. Plays have been written about him. Documentaries keep trying to solve the mystery. Online forums are filled with amateur investigators who’ve spent years studying flight paths, weather patterns, parachute capabilities, and every other conceivable angle.
Some people see Cooper as a folk hero – a working-class guy who beat the system and got away with it without hurting anyone. Others view him as just a criminal who happened to get lucky. Most people recognize him as a mystery that probably won’t ever be solved.
Geoffrey Gray wrote a book called “Skyjack: The Hunt for D.B. Cooper” in 2011. He tried to capture why this case has such an enduring grip on people’s imaginations. “Like the quests to find the Holy Grail and the Lost Dutchman Mine, the hunt for the hijacker is an odyssey that tests the boundaries of obsession,” he wrote. “The farther along the path one gets, stranger and stranger things happen.”
Rataczak’s death on October 22, 2025, removed one more direct witness to what happened that November night in 1971. Captain William Scott is gone. We don’t know the status of the flight attendants – Florence Schaffner, Tina Mucklow, and Alice Hancock. Flight engineer Harold Anderson’s fate is unclear. If any of them are still alive, they’re carrying memories that become more historically valuable every year that passes. The people who were actually there, who saw Cooper’s face and heard his voice and felt that pressure bump when he jumped – they’re disappearing one by one.
The man who sat in the co-pilot’s seat and felt the plane shudder when Cooper lowered the aft stairs and stepped out into the darkness is gone. The mystery he witnessed is still here.

References

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

#WeirdDarkness, #DBCooper, #UnsolvedMystery, #TrueCrime, #Hijacking, #ColdCase, #AviationMystery, #1971, #FBI, #PacificNorthwest

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