How many guys does it take to build an Automated Teller Machine (ATM)? Two

How many guys does it take to build an Automated Teller Machine (ATM)? Two.

OK.  Not really. That’s a bit of an oversimplification but it has at least a kernel of truth.

Luther Simjian held patents on all kinds of things – including an army flight simulator, a colour x-ray machine, a self-focusing camera, an exercise bicycle and a teleprompter – but he was best known for his work on the Bankograph, a machine that could accept cash or check deposits at any hour of the day or night.

Simjian’s Bankograph was able to accept cash or check deposits at all hours. He sold his machine to a New York City bank in 1960, but the idea didn’t really catch on with most customers at the time, although a revolution in customer oriented automation was just around the corner, and would also include photobooths, candy dispensers and gas stations, noted Bernardo Batiz-Lazo, and Robert J.K. Reid, of the University of Leicester and University of Glasgow, respectively, in their academic paper, Evidence from the Patent Record on the Development of Cash Dispensing Technology, produced for the New York-based Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2008 History of Telecommunications Conference. Bernardo Batiz-Lazo is currently a professor of business history and bank management at Bangor University in Wales. He is also the co-author, with Tom R. Harper, of the 2013 book Cash Box: The Invention and Globalization of the ATM. Batiz-Lazo is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and is a world-class authority on the automation of banking, financial technology, and cashless retail payment. Robert J.K. Reid is with the Department of Economic & Social History at the University of Glasgow.

“The only people using the machines were prostitutes and gamblers who didn’t want to deal with tellers face to face,” Simjian told the A&E Television Network’s History channel. “The most successful early deployments took place in Europe, where bankers responded to increasing unionization and rising labor costs by soliciting engineers to develop a solution for after-hours cash distribution,” Batiz-Lazo wrote for The Atlantic magazine in a March 26, 2015 article headlined, A Brief History of the ATM: How automation changed retail banking, an Object Lesson. In the cross-disciplinary 2004 volume, Wiring Prometheus: Globalisation, History and Technology, edited by Peter Lyth, a lecturer in German history at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and Helmuth Trischler, head of the research department of the Deutches Museum and Professor of History and History of Technology at the University of Munich in Germany, Aberystwyth University Welsh historian Richard Coopey, however, concluded that banks “in the United States and Britain considered direct costs a minor factor of purchasing systems …. [they] had little, if any, accurate idea of the cost-benefits of computing.” 

In an article headlined. “Fast Machine With a Buck”, Pacific Star and Stripes reported on July 7, 1966 on a Japanese device called the “Computer Loan Machine, ” which supplied cash as a three-month loan at a five per cent interest rate per annum after inserting a credit card in the machine.

While Simjian’s American machine was useful for people who just wanted to make deposits, it took another inventor to create a machine that could dispense cash. That inventor was England’s John Shepherd-Barron, who in 1965 got the idea for a cash-dispensing machine while taking a bath after finding his bank closed. It was his habit to withdraw money on a Saturday, but on this particular weekend he had arrived one minute late and found the bank doors locked. He was inspired by chocolate vending machines: “It struck me there must be a way I could get my own money, anywhere in the world or the UK. I hit upon the idea of a chocolate bar dispenser, but replacing chocolate with cash,” Shepherd-Barron later said. He sold his idea to London-based Barclays Bank.

He bumped into the chief general manager of Barclays Bank later in 1965, who was about to have lunch. Over a pink gin, Shepherd-Barron asked him for 90 seconds to pitch his idea for a cash machine,” The Telegraph recalled in May 2010.

“I told him I had an idea that if you put your standard Barclays cheque through a slot in the side of the bank, it will deliver standard amounts of money around the clock.

“He said, ‘Come and see me on Monday morning’.”

Barclays commissioned Shepherd-Barron to build six cash dispensers, the first of which was installed at a branch in the north London suburb of Enfield on June 27 1967, and was a signal moment marking the dawn of contemporary digital banking. The actor Reg Varney, star of the ITV sitcom On the Buses, was on hand to be the first to withdraw cash. Two other independent machines were also deployed in 1967, notes the Sioux Falls, South Dakota-based ATM Industry Association (ATMIA). One was located in Uppsala, Sweden,designed by Asea-Metior (today ABB) at the behest of the Swedish savings banks.This machine was called Bankomat. A second device was engineered by Chubb for the Westminster Bank (today RBS Group) in London.

Shepherd-Barron also came up with the idea of a four-digit PIN. When Shepherd-Barron was conceptualizing PINs, he envisioned them being six digits – it was his wife who suggested they be four.

“Over the kitchen table, she said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the world standard,” he later told BBC News.

With plastic bank cards bearing magnetic strips yet to be invented, Shepherd-Barron’s early machines used special cheques that were chemically coded by being infused with carbon-14, a radioactive isotope. Customers placed the cheque in a drawer, the machine detected the material and matched the cheque against a PIN before paying out. The maximum withdrawal originally was £10 or about $14.

The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) unveiled its first Canadian automated teller machine called a “24 hour cash dispenser,” on Dec. 1, 1969.

By 1970, several U.S. banks had invested in ATMs. One Ohio-based bank tried to appeal to female customers by advertising their new machines with commercials that played every 25 minutes during a six-hour Paul Newman movie marathon.

ATMs really started to catch on in the United States in January 1978 after New York City was hit by a huge blizzard that shut down banks for days. Citibank had invested millions into installing ATMs all over the city the previous year, so people could still get cash even though banks were closed. During the blizzard’s aftermath, ATM use increased by 20 per cent.

According to Smithsonian magazine, there are two Wells Fargo ATMs at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. In a 2010 interview with NeedCoffee.com, David Parker, senior vice president of digital branch & ATM at Wells Fargo, explained that one operates as a backup machine and only one ATM actually functions at a time.

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This is how Parliamentary democracy works: We change the governing party from time to time

Brian Pallister has been premier of Manitoba going on 12 hours now and as far as I can tell the world hasn’t ended, although Humpty Dumpty no doubt did take a big fall off the wall here in Northern Manitoba in last month’s 41st general election.

There has been a change in government in Manitoba today for the first time since Oct. 5, 1999. That’s how Parliamentary government works. We change governments every now and then. Truth be told, most elections are far more a referendum on the governing party than they are a vote for the imaginative new ideas the opposition parties put forward in any given campaign.

The April 19 election was a referendum on former Premier Greg Selinger, more than anything, and to a somewhat lesser extent, the rest of the long-governing NDP. Given how our Parliamentary system of government works, voters (at least outside his Winnipeg constituency of St. Boniface) couldn’t vote “yea” or “nay” to Selinger directly, so they did what Canadian voters have done since before Confederation: They threw the bums out, the lot of them, as the old saying, which probably started in the United States in the 1920s, as a chant by spectators at boxing and wrestling matches, before moving in due course to baseball, and finally politics, goes.

This year the bums happened to be the NDP. Other years it has been the Progressive Conservatives or Liberals. And as grand a day as this is for the Pallister Progressive Conservatives, who won 40 of the 57 seats in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly April 19 – tying a record for most seats set way back in 1915 when Premier Tobias Crawford Norris’ Liberals also won 40 seats in the Aug. 6 election in a legislature with 47 seats – they will in due course find a time when the people throw them out, and they are the bums again. That’s how government and elections work in Canada.

One good thing about a landslide win, which this was for the Manitoba PCs, is we’re spared the interminable debates that inevitably follow many closer election results in Canada, where the usual suspects argue in favour of either the current first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system we use in Canada, or more likely in recent years, argue for some form of proportional representation (PR), which is the most common system among well-established democracies.

It’s not that I haven’t taken enough political science courses in university to understand how much fairer PR would be, in theory anyway, compared to FPTP. No, it’s more a case of me being something of a self-admitted contrarian and pot-stirrer. Something like the federal election campaign of 1872 might appeal to me.

During the federal election campaign of 1872 – the country’s second after Confederation in 1867 – voting began on July 20, just five days after the writ was issued, and finished on Oct. 12, which was 89 days after the writ had been dropped – making it the longest in Canadian history, still surpassing last year’s 78-day federal election campaign. In fairness, it is something of an apples and oranges comparison because 1872 was still part of the fading era of multiple day voting, whereas 2015 was a single day contest last Oct. 19. The longest single day contest before last year was the  74-day campaign leading up to the Sept. 14, 1926 federal election.

Back in 1872, in all provinces except Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, elections were held on different dates in different ridings. The system allowed the party in power to hold elections in a safe riding first, hoping in this way to influence the vote in constituencies less favourable to them. The system even enabled a candidate who lost in one riding to run again in another. Steve Ashton might still be our NDP MLA in such a scenario applied provincially, although I’m not sure which constituency we might have him run in, if not Thompson.

The 1872 federal election was in fact the first time Manitobans, who joined Confederation as the fifth province – appropriately enough smack in the middle of 10, time-wise, as well as geographically – on July 15, 1870, got to participate in a federal election – and the last before the secret ballot was widely introduced (except for New Brunswick, which had adopted the secret ballot in 1855) , replacing oral voting – which really put a damper on politicians “treating” voters approaching their voting place with offers of cash, alcohol, pork, flour and other foodstuffs. In the 21^st century, politics is a bit more opaque and nuanced then it was in the 19^th century when it comes to those sort of enticements. The transparency was to be found back in 1872.

Let’s face it. When it comes to politics, elections (first-past-the-post or proportional representation or some other form of voting) and democracy, all rolled together, is a bit like sausage-making; the finished product tastes pretty good at the ballpark with a cold beer, or on the grill in the back yard, but you don’t necessarily want to see how the sausage is made. Same with governments. Unless you want to go back to 1872.

My old reporter friend Johnny Driscoll at the Peterborough Examiner used to say that sausage adage applied equally well to newspapering, and he was right.

As former Conservative Prime Minister Winston Churchill said in the British House of Commons on Nov. 11, 1947: “Many forms of government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time….”

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Last remaining fur auction of its type in North America ­– the 35th annual Thompson Fur Table – returns to Northern Manitoba Dec. 19-20

Photo courtesy of Jeanette Kimball

The last remaining fur auction of its type in North America ­– the 35th annual Thompson Fur Table – returns to St. Joseph’s Ukrainian Catholic Hall on Juniper Drive Dec. 19-20 and is expected be a $1 million-plus economic generator for trappers and Thompson businesses, but wild fur prices are expected to be down for the second straight year after a record payout in 2012 where 207 Northern Manitoba trappers pocketed $683,559 in payouts from fur buyers for their raw pelts either sold at the table or consigned to auction.

Last year’s Thompson Fur Table payout dropped $64,707 to $618,852 for 219 trappers in total amount of money paid out from the record-setting 2012, but was still one of the best ever in the history of the event, which dates back to 1979.

The event is organized by the Lac du Bonnet-based Manitoba Trappers Association. The Manitoba Trappers Association represents about 10 per cent of the total number of trappers in the province on its membership roll. There are an estimated 6,000 trappers in Manitoba and the industry generates between $10 and $15 million annually. In recent years, the event has cost the Manitoba Trappers Association $9,000 to $12,000 in annual expenses to put on.

The local weather is one of the major factors that affects when trappers in Northern Manitoba can get out on their trap lines and start harvesting, but the actual price they get for those furs is decided half a world away, with consumer demand in Russia, China and Korea being key determinants driving annual fur prices here, along with the temperature in Asia and Europe also playing a role, as cooler temperatures drive their consumer demand higher usually.

Marten typically makes up than 70 per cent of the total volume of fur traded at the Thompson  event. The top-grade marten pelt is “select,” which means the “best possible quality, fully winter prime pelts. Full bodied, fully covered skins, silky in appearance. Evenly covered with guard hair and heavy underwool. Fur and leather free of imperfections,” according to the North American Fur  Auctions TechManual.  In 2011, more than $345,000 worth of fur pelts changed hands at at the Thompson Fur Table, with the majority of that value coming from marten, which accounted for about $303,000 in fur sales.

Mainly,  although not exclusively aboriginal trappers from small primarily First Nations communities scattered all around Thompson, come into the city that bills itself the Hub of the North for the annual pre-Christmas December two-day event where trappers meet buyers from fur houses such as North American Fur Auctions, the continent’s largest fur auction house in Toronto, Fur Harvester’s Auction from North Bay, Ont. and the North West Company in Winnipeg, along with independent buyers.

The fur buyers count and examine the pelts as each trapper comes through the line, providing a quote for the lot and the trapper selects the best price. In this way the trapper benefits from the on-site competitive demand for their furs with the basic premise being to concentrate buyers in one area to promote the spirit of competition, Manitoba Trappers Association administrator and treasurer Cherry White says.

However, trappers who want to take their chances on a better price at the Wild Fur Market Auction in New York in February can do so by selling on consignment through either North American Fur Auctions or Fur Harvester’s Auction at the Thompson Fur Table,  which gives them 60 per cent of the cash value for their pelts up front, followed by a cheque next March for the remaining 40 per cent, with final price deterimined in February at the auction.

The number of trappers who show up at the Thompson Fur Table fluctuates from year-to-year: there were 219 in 2013; 207 in 2012; 179 in 201; 122 in 2010; 168 in 2009; 219 in 2008; 201 in 2007; 198 in 2006; 176 in 2005; and 232 in 2004.

The Thompson Fur Table was one of several such events initiated in 1979 by the Province of Manitoba, under Progressive Conservative Premier Sterling Lyon, and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, during Prime Minister Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservative government, to help Northern trappers get better prices for their raw pelts. Today, it is the only one of the events to have survived 35 years later.

Lane Boles, a retired Manitoba Conservation and Water Stewardship officer from here in Thompson, who sits as director-at-large on the board of the Manitoba Trappers Association, said Dec. 5 that he expects fur prices to be down at the Thompson Fur Table this year, primarily because of market conditions in Russia, which along with China and Korea, largely determine the price paid to local trappers.

In an Oct. 16 wild fur market update, Herman Jansen, managing director of North American Fur Auctions, said the “Russian economy has taken a hit, largely due to the problems in the Ukraine.  The Western embargoes of America and Europe have had a negative effect on the consumption of consumer products.  Food prices have increased sharply and the Russian ruble has gone from 32 rubles/$ U.S. a year ago to 41 rubles/$ U.S. today – a decrease in value of 28 per cent,  Politically and economically, Russia is weaker today than it was a year ago,” but added, “price decrease of 40 per cent 50 per cent for most wild fur and ranch raised mink has come at the right time for the Russian fur retailer …  For the economic situation in Russia to improve, we need the political situation vis-à-vis Ukraine, Russia and the West to improve.”

North American Fur Auctions is 100 per cent owned by four producer groups: the  Wild Fur Shippers Council (WFSC); American Mink Council (AMC); Canada Mink Breeders Association (CMBA), and the Canada Fox Breeders Association (CFBA).

Jansen joined Hudson’s Bay and Annings in London in 1966 and completed a two-year training program in fur technology. In 1968, he represented the Hudson’s Bay Company in Holland and was appointed manager of Dutch Operations in 1969.

He transferred to the United States in 1971 as account executive and was appointed manager of North American Operations in 1974.

Jansen transferred to Hudson’s Bay Company Fur Sales Canada Limited as vice-president of marketing in 1984.

In 1987, Jansen  was appointed senior vice-president; in 1989 president and CEO; and in 1997 chairman and CEO of the North American Fur Auctions Group.

In his update in mid-October, Jansen also noted that in China – their currency, the renminbi (RMB), also known as the yuan, “has been more or less steady against the U.S. dollar for the last 12 months.  In November of last year it was 6.10 RMB/$ U.S. and presently it is at 6.12 RMB/$ U.S.  The Chinese economy in general is in reasonably good shape.  Inflation appears to be down and the fur trade is optimistic about the upcoming season.  The newly established prices for wild fur and ranched mink in 2014 have created optimism for most manufacturers and retailers, who all believe that with the new price levels more garments will be sold.  The retail season in China does not begin in earnest until middle to late November.”

In Korea, he said,  “the Korean won is exactly at the same level as last November.  This means that in Korea, just like in China, the prices in shops will be a lot more attractive for wild fur garments.”

In 2012, Margo Pfeiff, a contributing editor at UpHere magazine in Yellowknife, came to Thompson for the year of the record-setting fur table. Her feature story,”Fur & Fortune” appeared in the October 2013 issue of the magazine. Pfeiff is a veteran travel writer and one of the most distinguished Arctic travel writers in Canada. She lives in Montreal but travels to the Canadian North regularly. Her work has appeared in numerous major magazine and newspapers, including also the Walrus, the Globe and Mail, the San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Times, Popular Mechanics, Reader’s Digest, Explore and Canadian Geographic magazines.

Boles said he suggested to Pfeiff that she sit north of the Miles Hart Bridge late on the Sunday morning after the fur tables had ended on the Saturday to observe the economic spinoffs.

Pfeiff closes her article by writing, “Over at the malls, where goods are being snapped up so fast that managers are helping restock the shelves, crowds of shoppers are pushing heaped carts across the packed parking lots. In the darkness, truck beds are piled high with furniture, appliances, toys and construction material. Snowmobiles are roped down on trailers. Then, one by one, the laden trucks join a line of traffic disappearing in a shroud of steam down the road, headed for far flung trapping outposts with names like York Landing, Cross Lake and Thicket Portage.”

On Nov. 24, 1971 – 43 years ago today – a man who would forever after be known by the alias ‘D.B. Cooper,’ skyjacked Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington in the most audacious and only unsolved act of air piracy in U.S. history

On Sept 21, 2013, I received a three-sentence e-mail from a reader out of the blue saying, “I just read your article on James Macdonald. I would never want to disrespect the deceased/missing, but he fits the description of Dan Cooper. The FBI suspects D.B. Cooper was from Canada.”

The Dec. 7, 2012 story he referred to was about James (Jim) Hugh Macdonald, 46, the owner of J.H. Macdonald & Associates Ltd., consulting structural engineers on Pembina Highway in Winnipeg, who climbed into his Mooney Mark M20D single-engine prop aircraft, bearing the registration mark CF-ABT, and took off half an hour after sunset from the Thompson Airport in Northern Manitoba at 4:30 p.m. on Dec. 7, 1971 to make his return flight home and disappeared into the rapidly darkening sky to never be seen or heard from again. He was the sole occupant of the four-seater plane.

To this day, the Winnipeg private pilot and civil engineer, who would be 89 if he were still alive, is still listed by the RCMP as a “missing person,” as no remains or wreckage were ever found, and is featured on the website of “Project Disappear,” Manitoba’s missing person/cold case project managed by the RCMP “D” Division historical case and major case management units in Winnipeg at: http://www.macp.mb.ca/results.php?id=76. “The file is currently still under investigation and is with the RCMP “D” Division historical case unit,” retired Sgt. Line Karpish, then senior media relations spokesperson for the Mounties in Winnipeg, said Dec. 6, 2012. The file number for the Macdonald missing person case  is File #: 1989-10514. Anyone with information on Macdonald’s disappearance almost 43 years ago is asked to call Winnipeg RCMP at (204) 983-5461 or contact them by email at: ddiv_contact@rcmp-grc.gc.ca

From the disappearance and still ongoing search for Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, with 239 people aboard (227 passengers and 12 crew), which took off from Kuala Lumpur after midnight Malaysia Time (MYT) on March 8, never making it to its 6:30. a.m. scheduled arrival in Beijing, disappearing from civilian radar over the Gulf of Thailand as responsibility was being handed from Malaysian ground control to Vietnam, to an Argentine military plane carrying 69 people that disappeared in 1965 and has never been found, to Amelia Earhart in 1937 through the disappearance of Flight 19, the five United States Navy TBM Avenger Torpedo Bombers that went missing over the Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic Ocean on Dec. 5, 1945, and then D.B. Cooper on Nov. 24, 1971 – just 2½ weeks before Macdonald disappeared – there has long been a huge public fascination with the mystery of missing aviators or similar aviation-related stories before Macdonald disappeared. His widow, Claire Macdonald, told me in an interview in December 2012 that someone once wildly jokingly said to her, “Maybe he flew to Mexico.” She said her reply was: “How far can you go in that little plane in that winter weather?” But the close nexus in time between the two aviation disappearances in late 1971 and the fact both men were Caucasians in their mid-forties made at least some Cooper and Macdonald comparisons inevitable.

J.H. Macdonald & Associates Ltd. was a small firm with about seven employees. Jim Macdonald was the only professional engineer on staff and a few months after his disappearance, its business affairs were wound down.

One of Macdonald’s last projects as a consulting structural engineer was the construction of additional classroom space for special needs students at Prince Charles School on Wellington Avenue at Wall Street in Winnipeg. He was in Thompson on business the day his plane disappeared on Dec. 7, 1971 for what was to be an in-and-out single day trip, but it is not certain now exactly what the business was. It may or may not have been related to proposed work for the School District of Mystery Lake since school construction projects were one of his areas of expertise.

Macdonald, who graduated from the University of Manitoba with his civil engineering degree in 1950, often worked with architectural firms, including his brother’s. Other than working for a year in Saskatoon, he spent his entire career living and working in Winnipeg. Macdonald, who was born on March 20, 1925, trained as a pilot when he was 19 and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) shortly before the Second World War ended in 1945 and before he could be shipped overseas into the theatre of combat operations.  His son, Bill Macdonald, was 15 when his dad disappeared in 1971 and is a Winnipeg teacher and freelance journalist, who in 1998 wrote The True Intrepid: Sir William Stephenson and the Unknown Agents, telling the story of the British Security Coordination (BSC) spymaster – codename Intrepid – set up by British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Ian Fleming, the English naval intelligence officer and author, best known for his James Bond series of spy novels, once said of his friend Stephenson, a Winnipeg native: “James Bond is a highly romanticized version of a true spy. The real thing is … William Stephenson.”

Macdonald had filed a 3½-hour flight plan to fly Visual Flight Rules (VFR) via Grand Rapids to Winnipeg that Tuesday. It was around -30 C at the time of takeoff on Dec. 7, 1971 and the winds were light from the west at five km/h, according to Environment Canada weather records, said Dale Marciski, a  recently retired meteorologist with the Meteorological Service of Canada in Winnipeg. Macdonald was reportedly wearing a brown suit jacket when he took off from Thompson and it was unknown whether the plane was carrying winter survival clothing and gear.

While there was some ice fog, Marciski said, the sky was mainly clear and visibility was good at 24 kilometres. Transport Canada’s VFRs for night flying generally call for aircraft flying in uncontrolled airspace to be at least 1,000 feet above ground with a minimum of three miles visibility and the plane’s distance from cloud to be at least 2,000 feet horizontally and 500 feet vertically. Transport Canada investigated the disappearance of Macdonald’s flight in 1971 because the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) had yet to be created.

Macdonald’s disappearance triggered an intensive air search that at its peak in the days immediately after the aviator went missing involved more than 100 personnel covering almost 20,000 miles in nine search and rescue planes from Canadian Armed Forces bases in Edmonton and Winnipeg, including a Lockheed T-33 T-bird jet trainer and two de Havilland short takeoff and landing CC-138 Twin Otters, two RCMP planes and 11 civilian aircraft.

The search for Macdonald and his Mooney Mark M20D began only hours after his disappearance, on the Tuesday night. The Lockheed T-33 T-bird jet trainer flew the missing aircraft’s intended flight line from Winnipeg to Thompson and back to Winnipeg. The T-33 carried highly sophisticated electronic equipment and flew Macdonald’s flight plan both ways at extremely high altitude hoping to pick up signals from the Mooney Mark M20D’s emergency radio frequency, or the crash position indicator, a radio beacon designed to be ejected from an aircraft if it crashes to help ensure it survives the crash and any post-crash fire or sinking, allowing it to broadcast a homing signal to search and rescue aircraft, which was believed be carried by Macdonald on the Mooney Mark M20D.

The next morning –  Dec. 8, 1971 – search and rescue aircraft re-flew the “track” in a visual search both ways, assisted by electronic listening devices, to no avail.

The area between Winnipeg and Thompson on both sides of the intended flight pattern was then zoned off and aircraft were assigned to particular zones and then flew the zones from east to west at one mile intervals until the entire area was over flown – first at higher altitudes and then again at lower altitudes.

Every private or commercial pilot flying the area assisted the organized search. Thompson Airport’s central tower was issuing a missing plane report at the end of every transmission, asking pilots in the area to keep a visual watch for Macdonald’s aircraft, and to listen for transmissions on the emergency band on their radios.

A second search for Macdonald and his Mooney Mark M20D single-engine prop aircraft was commenced almost six months later in May 1972, after spring had arrived in Northern Manitoba and all the snow had melted. Nothing turned up.

Who then was D.B. Cooper? The question still preoccupies old-time FBI agents and mystery aficionados alike.

There were nine frequently discussed suspects – all Americans, as far as I am aware –  over the years: Kenneth Christiansen, Lynn Doyle Cooper, Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr., Duane Weber, Jack Coffelt, William Gossett, Barbara (formerly Bobby) Dayton, John List and Ted Mayfield. Most had military combat experience. All the suspects are in fact dead now, with the exception of Mayfield, who denies being D.B. Cooper.

On Wednesday, Nov. 24, 1971  –  43 years ago today and the day before American Thanksgiving that year – someone using the alias Dan Cooper, which quickly got mistakenly turned into D.B. Cooper, committed the most audacious act of air piracy in U.S. history with the mid-afternoon skyjacking of Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305, flying over the Pacific Northwest, en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington with 36 passengers and six crew members aboard.

He paid $20 cash for his airline ticket in Portland. Once on board, Cooper passed a note to flight attendant Florence Schaffner demanding $200,000 ransom in unmarked $20 bills and two back parachutes and two front parachutes.  Initially, Schaffner dropped the note unopened into her purse, until Cooper leaned toward her and whispered, “Miss, you’d better look at that note. I have a bomb.”

The day-before-Thanksgiving flight landed in Seattle, where passengers were exchanged for parachutes, including possibly an NB-8 rig with a C-9 canopy, known as a “double-shot” pinch-and-pull system that in 1971 would have allowed jumpers to disengage quickly from their chutes after they landed so that the wind did not drag them, and the cash, all in $20 bills, as he had demanded, although not unmarked it would turn out.

The plane took off again with only Cooper and the crew aboard about half an hour later. Cooper told the pilot to fly a low-speed, low-altitude flight path at about 120 mph, close to the minimum before the plane would go into a stall, at a maximum 10,000 feet, to aid in his jump. To ensure a minimum speed he specified that the landing gear remain down, in the takeoff and landing position, and the wing flaps be lowered 15 degrees. To ensure a low altitude he ordered that the cabin remain unpressurized.

He bailed out into the rainy night through the plane’s rear stairway, which he lowered himself, somewhere near the Washington-Oregon boundary in Washington State, probably near Ariel in Cowlitz County, or possibly around Washougal or Camas in Clark County.

In February 1980, eight-year-old Brian Ingram, vacationing with his family on the Columbia River about 20 miles southwest of Ariel, uncovered three packets of $5,800 of the ransom cash, disintegrated but still bundled in rubber bands, as he raked the sandy riverbank beachfront at an area known as Tina’s Bar to build a campfire on the Columbia River about 20 miles southwest of Ariel.

So why do we remember D.B. Cooper some 43 years later? Was the 1971 jump from 10,000 feet into the sub-freezing temperatures and bitter wind-chills during freefall even survivable?

Geoffrey Gray, a contributing editor at New York magazine and the author of Skyjack: The Hunt for D. B. Cooper, suggested in a New York Times article on Aug. 6, 2011 that it’s the “not-knowing” that makes Cooper so compelling for us. “In an age when we receive answers to our questions so quickly – now as fast as a midsentence trip to Wikipedia – the fact that we still don’t know who Cooper is feels somehow unfair,” Gray argues.

“Even some lawmen who scoured the woods for Cooper four decades ago suggested they hoped they would come up short.

“If he took the trouble to plan this thing out so thoroughly, well, good luck to him,” one local sheriff said.

But no trace of Cooper or Macdonald have ever been found.

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