Post your final verdict.
If he survived the jump- I think it had to be Bob Whatever, the now deceased paratrooper who the amateur sleuths tracked down in Florida. No amateur could have realistically survived that jump. The skills to hit that jump in those conditions and the not die of exposure trying to find a way out of the forest take years of training at a very high level. Someone who went skydiving once or twice pulling that off is like someone who has never made anything more complicated than a Hot Pocket preparing a perfect Beef Wellington. Not. Gonna. Happen.
How did Bob get away with it? He went about his life like he never had done it. Whatever money he spent was done modestly and sparsely enough that no large number of the tracked bills went into the system at once. Hell, money probably wasn’t even the primary motive. He just wanted to do it.
If he didn’t survive the jump- Well that blows the field wide open doesn’t it? It didn’t have to be someone in the industry who knew the stall speed of a 727 and that you could deploy the rear stairs in flight, only someone who knew someone with that knowledge and managed to get it from them without being too obvious about it. The rest of the main elements are all careful planning with general knowledge. If you jump in a clear and even sparsely populated area you will get caught. You have to ask for multiple parachutes to keep the possibility that you plan to take hostages off the plane alive. Maintain as low a profile as you can during the hijacking to keep the potential witnesses to a minimum.
Personally, I don’t think he survived the jump. Boring answer, I know. The area he jumped into is so vast and wild that the odds of finding his remains were always poor. Animal and insect activity in an undisturbed forest can scatter a human corpse fast. Maybe a bear dragged him off and buried him for later feeding as they often do with their prey/carrion. The money that kid later found probably got ripped away from him as soon as he stepped off the 727. Maybe he dropped like a stone. Maybe his parachute deployed and he hit the ground alive only to succumb to the elements. At this point we may never even know who he was, let alone what happened to him.
Posting this since Cooper was brought up in the thread about Kerby’s knee. @Weaselpuppy is our resident Cooper Trooper and knows much more about the case than what I recall off the top of my head.
