Northwest Airlines Flight 305 began as the most prosaic of milk runs. It started in Washington, D.C., at 8:30 a.m. last Wednesday, with scheduled stops at Minneapolis, Great Falls and Missoula, Mont., Portland, Spokane and finally Seattle. What happened en route rivaled Alfred Hitchcock's more baroque fantasies. In the most elaborate skyjacking ploy in the bizarre history of air piracy, an inconspicuous middle-aged traveler identified on the manifest as "D.B. Cooper" extorted $200,000 from the airline, and apparently foiled any plan of capture by parachuting to safety over southwest Washington State....
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