What is the most recent consensus on the fate of skyjacker D.B. Cooper? Have any recent historical investigations offered anything new?

The consensus is that the hijacker is likely dead. There is no consensus about who the individual was.

There have been few serious historical examinations of what the FBI calls the "NORJAK Investigation." The sole book published by a university press about the hijacking is 1991's D.B. Cooper: The Real McCoy, which was published by the University of Utah Press and wasn't reviewed well. Michael Allen, a University of Washington-Tacoma professor, said in Pacific Northwest Quarterly that "(The co-author's) prose at times aspires to that of good forties detective fiction" and the book is effectively "an interesting exercise in the use of circumstantial evidence."

The Real McCoy posits that Richard Floyd McCoy Jr., a Vietnam veteran, avid skydiver and former helicopter pilot ─ who performed a similar, copycat crime in 1972 ─ was "Cooper", but there's problems with that idea, including that McCoy had an alibi (he was seen elsewhere a day after Cooper's jump) and his age doesn't match.

Enormous amounts of analysis have been done by non-professional (note, not the same as unprofessional) researchers ─ forex, there's a popular skydiving forum with a section devoted to the Cooper hijacking. It covers more than 2,300 pages of discussion.

One of the best recent recapitulations of the hijacking's events comes from Brian Dunning's Skeptoid podcast if you need a refresher.

You will find countless advocates of particular suspects, particular theories, and particular possibilities. The NORJAK incident has garnered immense pop culture interest, and as Allen wrote in 1991:

"We still need to know what it was about the Cooper incident that so captured the public imagination during the winter of 1971-72. What caused the outpouring of Cooperiana ─ from oral tales to baseball caps to a recording by the former Byrds musicians Roger McGuinn and David Crosby ─ in folklore and popular culture?

What is D. B. Cooper's relationship to other outlaw folk heroes, such as Robin Hood, Billy the Kid, and Pretty Boy Floyd?"

I suspect the NORJAK case fascinates us for the same reason we imagine winning the lottery: It involves the possibility of becoming wealthy quickly, without harming anyone (except mentally) and escaping without a trace. It's the "perfect crime," and that's attractive to people who would never otherwise consider breaking the law.

The bottom line is that the FBI spent thousands of man-hours investigating the NORJAK case immediately after it took place, and again in the 2000s, when Special Agent Larry Carr (of the FBI's Seattle office) devoted a lot of attention to it. Carr's work brought in DNA testing and other scientific methods unavailable at the time of the hijacking, but to no avail.

The sole physical evidence (other than what was left behind on the hijacked aircraft), was found in 1980 by a boy who pulled a rotting package full of $20 bills from a bank of the Columbia River. Bills in the package matched those given to Cooper. Examination determined the package (which contained $5,800 total) had been deposited on the bank naturally by river currents, not buried purposefully.

Given that Cooper jumped without a functioning reserve parachute, without proper clothing, likely without groundside assistance, into an extremely remote and cold area, into darkness and rain, and was never seen again, it seems unlikely that he survived the jump. "We originally thought Cooper was an experienced jumper, perhaps even a paratrooper,” Carr said in 2007. “We concluded after a few years this was simply not true. No experienced parachutist would have jumped in the pitch-black night, in the rain, with a 200-mile-an-hour wind in his face, wearing loafers and a trench coat. It was simply too risky. He also missed that his reserve chute was only for training and had been sewn shut—something a skilled skydiver would have checked.”

Even if Cooper survived the jump ─ then somehow evaded detection for the past 45 years despite several eyewitness description ─ he is likely dead today of natural causes. At the time of the incident, eyewitnesses noted that he appeared to be in his 40s. That would put him well into his 80s today, and that's longer than the typical life expectancy of a white male born in the 1930s.

In July 2016, the FBI effectively closed the case, announcing that it would redirect NORJAK resources to other priorities.

If you're frustrated by this unsolved mystery, there is something you can do to help. On the day after Thanksgiving, an online magazine is crowdsourcing an effort to organize, categorize and search portions of the NORJAK Investigation's FBI documents, obtained from various sources. You can participate here.