How Dan Cooper JUMPED from an aircraft and the end of aft Air-stairs!

did you know that when you're standing in line at the airport waiting to get your baggage checked that that actually is connected to the aft ventral air stairs on the boeing 727 also did you know that the air stairs are connected to things like for example the most famous hijacking of all times and clandestine cia operations as well as some huge engineering challenges well that's what we're going to be talking about today as we enter the world of the air stairs and why we don't see them at the back of the aircraft anymore stay tuned this video is brought to you in cooperation with skillshare now i know just from you watching this episode that you're a lifelong learner someone who's curious and wants to constantly improve yourself in that case i highly recommend you to check out skillshare they are an online learning platform with high quality video courses and pretty much anything that you can imagine i for example have used it together with my oldest son lucas as he is trying to prepare for his ppl license with a course called learn how to fly an aircraft with howard forder but there are loads of other courses as well professional photography or how to improve your own youtube channel now the 1000 first of you who clicks this link will get a free trial version of skillshare so go down click it and then just browse around and see if you can find a course that interests you okay guys this is an episode that i had no idea i was going to love as much as i do okay this all started in the beginning of the week actually where a person on twitter contacted me and asked peter why is it that we don't see these fantastic aft ventral air stairs on aircraft anymore we used to see them all the time now they seem to be nowhere why is that and i looked into it and i thought actually that's a great question and i started researching and the more i researched the more fantastic facts i found so what we will do in this episode is i'm going to go back and start with the earliest version of air stairs okay and then we're going to move forward through the history of the air stairs through the different models used and we're going to go through one of the most famous crime stories in aviation history now at the end i will tell you why we don't see them anymore so make sure to stay tuned throughout the episode now the first aircraft that i could find that was utilizing airstairs was the convert 240 and the martin 202. these were aircraft that came just after the second world war right they were the the first really dedicated kind of passenger aircraft and the air stairs were fitted onto these as means to kind of quicken up boarding and disembarkation in smaller airports so what the airs there actually is is a stair that is a mechanical part of the aircraft in itself it means that if you have those the passengers will be able to board and disembark without any help of outside kind of ground equipment so this is something that the airlines really liked because even though the early versions of these airstrips were really heavy and took up quite a lot of place the fuel economy wasn't so much a factor as the handling was and the airlines loved the fact that they could fly out to small airfields small airports out in the bush somewhere and handle passengers without those airports having to make large investments into things like stairs or air bridges but that's further down in the history so as these early conveyors and martins started to become obsolete there were new aircraft coming onto the market the back 111 for example was also equipped with air stairs both in the front and what we call the aft ventral air stairs which is the one coming out of the tail of the aircraft and following the back 111 we started getting in to the bigger jet aircraft so one of my personal favorites the boeing 727 now on the boeing 727 the aft ventraler stair had a couple of different jobs actually so first of all it was once again a means to get passengers on and off the aircraft and passengers loved this airstairs because it allowed them to get out on the apron walk around this beautiful aircraft and then in under the beautiful t-tail and into the lovely cabin inside but on top of that the air stairs was also an emergency exit right as you started to have more passengers aboard the aircraft there was a bigger need for emergency exits to be you know let people out quickly and also on the case of the 727 since it had all of its three engines in the back it had a tendency during loading to kind of tilt backwards and the aft air stair was actually constructed in a way where if the airster was extended then you could use the hydraulic arms and you kind of click them into a lock position where the air stair became an anti-tipping device so in the early versions the 727 100 it was part of the walk around for the second officer to make sure that before boarding started they were out and those were properly locked into position now another feature on the 727 was that the whole air stair mechanism of which the four first steps of the air stairs was actually part of the aircraft superstructure and then the last remaining 10 feet of the air stair was part of kind of a pivoting airstair structure they were all situated outside of the aft pressure bulkhead so this meant that the whole air stair structure was outside of the pressurized cabin and because it was outside of the pressurized cabin it meant that from the air stairs you could access some quite critical systems in the back of the 727 for maintenance purpose as well as some simple engine engineering tasks for the central engine and also because of what's outside of the pressure bulkhead boeing never really thought that there was any point to have a an internal locking mechanism for the uh for the stairs you know you retracted them they were held up by hydraulics but there was no need for an actual lock because you know who's going to access this anyway it's outside of their pressure vessel and because of this feature and because there was never any inside lock attached to it it drew the attention of the u.s military and the cia because the cia in the 60s were looking for ways to sometimes drop agents and material during clandestine operations that means that you know sometimes they were flying over countries where you know the military couldn't fly but civilian airliners could fly and because the 727 was a civilian airliner and it had this ability to drop the aft airstairs in flight it could be used in this way and in fact during 1968 there were quite a few tests done over thailand where the cia was using the 727 and they actually bought 3 727 under their front airline southern hair transport they used those to test out how to be able to safely drop parachuting soldiers or agents or even cargo from it and they found out that if you flew the 727 with flaps 20 selected and an airspeed up to a maximum of 140 knots in that case you could actually do this safely so we don't know how many times the caa actually utilized this and where obviously that's classified but we do know that these tests were attempted and that they were successful and in fact the 727 if you converted the steps into kind of a railing system instead it was actually quite effective for dropping cargo and this leads us in to the most famous hijacking in all of aviation history on thanksgiving eve the 24th of november 1971 a uh a man who called himself dan cooper bought a one-way ticket from portland to seattle with northwest orient airlines mr cooper boarded the aircraft together with all of the other passengers and he took a seat in the very last row on the right hand side in the middle seat the aircraft taxed it out took off and just after departure mr cooper dinged the cabin crew one of the cabin crew came up to him and he quietly gave her a note now at the time and really nowadays as well it's not uncommon for flight attendants to receive notes from uh from gentlemen so she didn't think much of it she just put it in her purse but mr cooper dinged her again and told her that you should really look at that note because i am carrying a bomb with me now obviously that caught her attention and cooper told her to sit down next to him and she asked him if she could see the bomb cooper opened his bag and she could look inside and see that there were indeed what looked like eight cylindrically formed tubes together with a battery and some isolation so it looked like a real bomb the cabin crew took this message and looked at the note now we don't know exactly what it said in the notes the notes disappeared but we do know that he wanted two hundred thousand dollars in used american currency as well as four parachutes and access to this aircraft fuel now the aircraft you guessed it is a boeing 727 the flight attendant brought this note up to the flight deck flighttech read the notes they forwarded the information of the note to ground control and ground control started to try to gather this ransom turned out that in seattle there was a bank who had what's called a a ransom set like a package of money that is prepared in the event of something like this where someone calls for ransom now the importance of that is that every single note inside of that ransom package had been photographed and catalogued so in case it would resurface somewhere later on it would be easier to track it so that package was brought to the um to the airport together with some parachutes from the local parachuting club and the whole ordeal took about two hours during which the 727 was circulating above seattle airport flight crew didn't tell the rest of the passenger what's going on they said that had a small technical issue and that's the reason for the delay and during this delay cooper was chatting with one of the flight attendants he was being very polite he was dressed in a white shirt black pants some loafers and he just looked like an ordinary guy in his mid 40s during the chat he was saying you know he was making comments about what was happening below on the ground and he made reference to a local air force base for example so it seemed like he knew his way around the area eventually the aircraft landed in seattle and cooper asked the crew to please tax it to a remote part of the apron that was well lit he told the pilots to tell the passengers to put their window shades down reason for this being that he was afraid probably of snipers and once they got down on the ground and parked where cooper wanted them to park the uh the station manager came out with the four parachutes and the ransom money to the aircraft and loaded it up through the aft ventral air stairs now you might ask yourself why would he need four different parachutes the fact is that he had probably thought this through and if he was asking for four different parachutes it would likely be so that the people on the ground thought that he might actually take a hostage with them and that is going to decrease the chance of them tempering and trying to destroy the parachutes to to kind of you know kill him basically once cooper had received the money and the parachutes he let all of the passengers go off the aircraft as well as some of the cabin crew and left on board was only the two pilots one flight engineer and one senior cabin crew so now cooper is starting to talk to the flight crew and he started to tell them what his plan is and he tells them that he wants the aircraft to be fully fueled to set up a course down towards mexico city and he wants them to take off with the aft air stairs open he wants them to fly with the gear down with the flaps at 15 at the maximum of 10 000 feet and unpressurized and try to keep the speed as low as possible all of these very strange demands obviously but makes sense if you are planning to actually jump off the aircraft the pilots told them that with that configuration they won't have enough um endurance to reach mexico city and they decided that you know maybe we'll do a fuel stop in reno cooper agreed to this but they had several different airports in mind when it came to where to stop and refuel and it didn't seem like cooper really cared which one they chose which is strange if you think about him wanting to jump out because a different track obviously is going to put him in a completely different spot anyway cooper wanted to take off with the air stairs open the northwest airlines said no we think that's dangerous and cooper then curiously responded that no it's not dangerous and this is interesting because there had been tests done with the 727 where they had both landed and taken off with the after-venture flare stairs open because it's hydraulically activated even if it did make contact with the runway it just meant that it kind of got pushed up so it was indeed considered not to be dangerous and cooper seemed to to know that which is interesting anyway he didn't fuss with them he said fine we can put them up i'm going to put it down when we get airborne anyway so at about 7 40 local time so this is now during complete darkness the aircraft took off again towards reno in the required configuration now just after departure cooper told the remaining flight attendant to that she could go in and join the other crew members in the cockpit and close the door the last thing that she saw when she turned around and looked back at him was that he was fiddling with something and putting something around his wrists about 20 minutes later when the whole crew was inside of the cockpit they got the airstair warning lights coming on in the cockpit indicating that at this point cooper was likely opening the uh the ventral stairs from the back because it was unpressurized he could then access the air stairs from the from the back of the cabin and about 13 minutes after the initial warning the crew could feel that there was a trim change in the aircraft meaning that they could feel that the aircraft's pitching a little bit backwards and then pitching a little bit forward again and after that there was no other movement the crew continued to fly to reno as expected when they landed they were boarded by police who made a thorough search of the aircraft but there was no signs of mr dan cooper the only thing that he could find was i think a tie with a clip-on on it um what was left of some of the the parachutes that had been tampered with and a few other personal items including a couple of cigarettes if i'm not mistaken but dan cooper was nowhere to be found so basically from that they deduced that probably when the crew felt that trim change was when cooper jumped out now when that happened the aircraft was at 10 000 feet in the middle of a rainstorm and it was pitch black outside so the authorities didn't think that he had much chance of actually getting down alive on top of that he was dressed in some loafers some black pants a white shirt and a black tie so if he did jump out into that rainstorm i bet he would have wished that he had a nice hoodie on instead curiously the aircraft was also followed by two f-106 fighter jets and they were followed above and below to make sure that they were out of sight of cooper and those fighter jets reported that they had not seen anything however in the pitch darkness of the night inside of a rainstorm it is unlikely that they would see a small figure jumping out in any case there was a huge manhunt happening after this they calculated approximately where he might have dropped depending on if he got his shoot open or not but there was never any sign found of dan cooper later several suspect was interviewed a man called d.b cooper was interviewed but he was quickly removed from the investigation but because of an error in local newspaper the perpetrator was not known as dan cooper he was then known as db cooper and that's why you hear db cooper in the press all the time but there was nothing found nothing from the parachute nothing of the money and no dan cooper only a few years later a boy that was playing on the banks of a nearby river found a couple of stacks of notes that was seen and recorded to come from the robbery but it didn't answer any questions and it didn't lead to anything but what it did lead to was copycats right because this was seen as at the time the only successful hijacking ever the following year as many as 15 similar attempts of hijacking were made people were carrying guns they were carrying you know fake bombs and they all did the same thing which was the board a boeing 727 threatened the crew get money take off again and then jump out the curious thing though is that most of them actually did jump out and they did survive even though they were almost immediately caught by the police but it did show that there was a possibility that dan cooper might have actually survived the attempt the faa though was not impressed as you might expect they did not like you know these copycat crimes happening over and over again so what they did was that in 1973 they started using the first passenger bag screening so from 1973 onwards passengers were required to show what they had in their bags and on their person before they were allowed to board an aircraft and that dramatically reduced the number of knives and pistols and guns and bombs that was taken on board but on top of this the faa also told boeing that it's not good enough to not have any kind of locking mechanism you have to make sure that this aft ventral door cannot be opened in flight and boeing looked at the problem they weren't really into trying to make some really complicated locking mechanism so one of the engineering team actually came up with an ingenious idea to solve the problem and what they came up with was to be known as a cooper vein what a coopervane actually is and this was not only used for the boeing 727 it was later used for both the dc-9 the md-80 and the md-95 it is a vein that is sitting perpendicular to the aircraft connected to the vein is a small metal plate that metal plate is spring-loaded to keep the vein in a perpendicular position that works fine on the ground but as soon as the aircraft starts rolling and starts building up speed the wind pushes the vein and that pushes the plate over the door so as long as the aircraft is in movement that plate will keep the door from opening as the aircraft lands slows down the spring-loaded plate would start pushing the vein back into the original position and that will then unlock the door a really really simple but very effective solution once again called the cooper vein after the rubber so what happened to the air stairs then and specifically the aft ventral stairs well they were actually continuing to be used um for some of the more modern aircraft as well the the dc-9 had them the md-80 had them the md-95 had them um but the difference on the on the dc-9 and the md-80s and forward was that they were both used as air stairs but the emergency exit was not actually the air stairs the emergency exit was connected to the tail cone so if an emergency were to happen and you needed to exit the aircraft really quickly instead of running down the stairs you could just pull a lever inside of the aircraft that will make the tail cone of the aircraft fall off now the tail cone was shaped in a way that if it fell to the ground it would immediately roll to the side and it would pull out an emergency shoot so that you could jump out on the emergency slide slide down to safety on those aircraft that catwalk that you needed in order to run out and jump down the slide it actually folded up into the roof of the aircraft when the aft ventral stairs was used and this this is just a feat of engineering anyway um the emergency exit was also there on the latest in that series of aircraft which was the boeing 717 but when asked if the airlines wanted the aftermath lair stairs as well they actually turned it down at this time the use of external steps and the air walkways going out to the aircraft was used almost everywhere so there was no really any need for these stairs anymore which was quite heavy and cost a lot to actually carry with them on top of this the more modern aircraft the bigger aircrafts stopped using the engines towards the back of the aircraft they started putting them under the wings instead that makes the aircraft higher the higher the aircraft becomes the longer of an air stair you will need and the more it will weigh so it just became economically impossible to fit aircraft with those anymore and as a final point if you've looked at modern airliners you've noticed that towards the very back of the aircraft is generally where we have the galleys today and where we have the toilets so that we can utilize the cabin for as many passengers as possible of course if you have an exit towards the very back you won't be able to use that area for a galley so all of these things combined is what led to the disappearance of those aft ventral air stairs but i really like them i have been boarding an aircraft the dc-9 that way i thought it was really cool to be able to get into the aircraft to that airs and air stairs are still available we are using them on the boeing 737-800 they're available in the front door and actually we use them on a daily basis right when we fly to smaller airports we still use the air stairs and because our passengers tend to be boarding from the ground instead of using those um air walkways or fingers so that's it guys i hope that you have enjoyed this content and if you have questions as always pile them in below and i'll try to answer as many of them as possible if you enjoy this kind of content and you like you know for example news flashes about what's happening or whatever that is that i'm doing but i make sure that you have subscribed to the channel and that you tell your friends about the channel as well um i want to be able to communicate with you as good as i possibly can and because of that i have created the free mentor aviation app that you can download you know there's a link up here or in the description of the video i also have a discord server that you can use we are doing some cool quizzes and loads of fun thing i'd love to have you on board there uh i want to say a special thank you to skillshare who's been the sponsor of this episode without my sponsors i wouldn't be able to spend as much time researching and making these kind of videos so a huge thank you to them use the link below to go and get a free trial version of skillshare right now have an absolutely fantastic day wherever you are and i'll see you next time [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: Mentour Pilot

Views: 508,248

Keywords: Airstairs, Air stairs, Boeing 727, D.B Cooper, DB Cooper, CIA, Boeing 737, Aviation Facts, Aviation explained, Mentour Pilot, Mentour Pilot airstairs, Mentour Pilot Boeing 737, Pilot, Pilot life, how to become a pilot, famous hijacking, crime story, Aviation news, Boeing 707, MD 80, Bac 1-11, Fear of flying, Fear of flying help, Nervous flyer, Nervous flyer help, aft ventral air stair, Story telling, Why no aft airstairs, Boeing 747, Boeing 717, Airbus A320

Id: vRM4qS3vfB0

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021