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| 12/24/2008 2:09:00 AM | Email this article • Print this article |
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| Molly Littlefield, a commercial airline pilot from Kent, was recruited to impersonate Barb Dayton, a DB Cooper hijacking suspect, in a National Geographic TV special on the only unsolved skyjacking case in the Untied States. |
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DB Cooper flies into Thun Field - again!
by Bruce Smith
The legendary skyjacker DB Cooper flew into Thun Field last Tuesday for his photo-op.
Or should we say, she flew in.
Molly Flanagan-Littlefield, a commercial pilot for United who lives in the Kent area, was invited by a National Geographic film crew making a documentary on DB Cooper to don a wig and fly around Thun in her vintage 1946 Cessna 140 aircraft.
Flanagan-Littlefield's impersonation was part of the efforts of Edge West Productions of Los Angeles to recreate the scenes of Cooper suspect Barb Dayton's life at Thun Field. Edge West is basing much of its documentary on a book written by another Thun Field pilot and his wife, Ron and Patricia Forman, titled The Legend of DB Cooper- Death by Natural Causes.
The Formans say their life-long friend and fellow Thun pilot Barb Dayton confessed to them in 1978 that she was DB Cooper, having pulled off the caper by reverting to the male persona she once had until her sex change operation in 1969.
The Formans' book describes the fascinating story of a reckless daredevil named Bobby Dayton, who became Barb Dayton in Washington's first case of sex-reassignment surgery.
The Formans also recount numerous details of the skyjacking that Dayton told them during a period in the late 1970s when she incorrectly thought she was free of criminal prosecution due to the expiration of her statute of limitations. Details such as why she made the heist, where she buried the money, and how she escaped detection for over 30 years compose the key elements of Edge West's documentary, being filmed for National Geographic cable TV and scheduled to air in August, 2009.
D.B. Cooper hijacked a Northwest Airlines Boeing 727 in November, 1971, just after take-off from Portland, Ore. He parachuted with $200,000 tied to his waist and has never been seen since. The crime remains the only unsolved skyjacking case in the history of the United States.
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