One airborne extortion spawned eighteen copycat hijackings within months

Evidence

Cooper devised a clever extortion technique. He hijacked a Boeing 727 and exchanged the passengers on the flight for four parachutes and $200,000 when the plane landed in Seattle. He then ordered the flight crew to fly the plane to Mexico City. As the plane flew into the night, he parachuted from the tail exit to avoid entangling the parachute lines on the tail or the stabilizers. Although massive searches were conducted, no trace of Cooper has ever been found, except for some money whose serial numbers matched those on the bills given to Cooper (Gray, 2007). Within a few months there were 18 hijackings on Boeing 727s modeled on the parachute-extortion technique. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 745

Categorization

• CANDY: D. B. Cooper’s single genius caper triggered 18 copycat hijackings in months — and he vanished without trace, only some serial-numbered bills surfacing.
• SHARE: For a true-crime obsessive: the copycat-cluster detail — 18 Boeing 727 hijackings after Cooper — is a narrow, niche fact they’d love.
• XREF: Coevolves with the earlier Doomsday Flight examples in this chapter — all demonstrating Bandura’s observational-learning mechanism.