The FBI has never officially stated that Cooper died in the jump. Investigators have at various times said they believe he could not have survived—citing the conditions, the equipment (a business suit rather than cold-weather gear, and a parachute that was military surplus rather than skydiver-calibrated)—but this is the investigators’ assessment of probability, not a finding of death. It is a theory, not a conclusion.
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## The D.B. Cooper Name
The hijacker identified himself as Dan Cooper. He was never publicly known by that name.
In the aftermath of the hijacking, reporters covering the investigation in Portland obtained information about an early suspect—a local man with the last name Cooper—and some of that information circulated in press coverage with the suspect’s full initials. The suspect was quickly eliminated from the investigation. But the name stuck in a different form: “D.B. Cooper” entered news coverage and never left.
The FBI, for much of the case, referred to the subject as Dan Cooper in official communications, reflecting the alias he actually used. The public, the media, and eventually most of the FBI’s own public-facing materials adopted D.B. Cooper, the name that came from a reporting mix-up about a man who had nothing to do with the hijacking.
There is also an origin theory for the Dan Cooper alias itself. French-language Belgian comics published in the 1950s and 1960s featured a fictional Royal Canadian Air Force pilot named Dan Cooper, who wore a flight suit on the cover of one issue shown parachuting from a plane. The comics were never translated into English and were not widely known in the United States. Some investigators and researchers have speculated that whoever bought that Portland ticket had read the French-language comics—a detail that would imply some connection to Canadian or French-speaking culture, or simply a very specific cultural reference. The FBI has not confirmed this as an established lead.