Following three hijackings in 1972, Boeing 727 aircraft were ordered by the Federal Aviation Administration to be fitted with a device known as a "Cooper Vane", a mechanical aerodynamic wedge, which prevents the rear stairway from being lowered in flight. The device was named for famed airplane hijacker D. B. Cooper, who used the rear stairway to exit the plane and make his escape via parachute.
Cooper then told the pilot to fly slowly at ten thousand feet in the direction of Nevada, and not long after takeoff, somewhere over southwest Washington, he gathered up the ransom, lowered the plane's back stairs, and parachuted into the night.
In the aftermath of Cooper's leap, "para-jacking," as it was known, became an epidemic in American skies.
The latch was known as the CooperVane, and it seemed, at the time, to be an effective response to the reign of terror in the skies.
Once she saw what the note said, she alerted the flight crew and confronted Cooper, who showed her the inside of his bag and what appeared to be a bomb (red cylinders, wires).
Cooper waited within the plane and the parachutes and money were brought on for him; it is thought that he asked for multiple parachutes to make the authorities figure he was going to bring someone off the plane with him, and they wouldn't risk sabotaging the chutes.
Cooper's lasting legacy is the "CooperVane", a latching device that prevents an airline door from being opened while the plane is in the air.
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