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Steve Fossett Missing
- Thread starter WildCowboy
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Not the kind of airplane usually used for cross-county flying. Aerobatics, and training, mainly. I'm surprised that nobody seems to know where he was headed.
FWIW, hardly anyone files flight plans for VFR.
The airplane should also have had an operable ELT (emergency locator transmitter), which should make it easy to find especially if he was flying locally.
I've never seen that site before. Somebody has actually taken pictures of my airplane too. Wild.
Eek! I used to skydive from little planes like that. The ride up was scarier than actually jumping. I was always relieved to get out of the thing. I hope they find him and I hope he's OK, but I guess it doesn't look so good.
Am I the only one who finds it slightly odd that they can't find it.
...It's not like the plane vanished over the Pacific in the mid-1900s. ...This is 2007!
...It's not like the plane vanished over the Pacific in the mid-1900s. ...This is 2007!
Am I the only one who finds it slightly odd that they can't find it.
...It's not like the plane vanished over the Pacific in the mid-1900s. ...This is 2007!
it's quite easy Eric. no offense, but have you flown over non-populated areas of north america? It can be extremely thick. if a plane were to bust through top canopy of a thick forest, it could be well hidden.
i've been deer hunting where i've walked on such tree roots and thick junipers, that I wasn't even on the ground and I was up 2 or 3 feet.
easily done unfortunately.
as 'good' as humans are, we'll never conquer this planet
Am I the only one who finds it slightly odd that they can't find it.
...It's not like the plane vanished over the Pacific in the mid-1900s. ...This is 2007!
I think it's very odd. I can't recall the last time I heard of an airplane disappearing over land in the U.S. If the airplane crashed, the ELT could be heard by anyone with a radio flying within miles of it. And this is desert country we're talking about, not jungle. I'd call it quite puzzling.
That is weird. It's been what? Two days now? You'd think they would know something.
I suspect alien abduction.
I read a quote in the paper this morning from somebody who said (more or less) that if Steve Fossett was killed in this way then it would be like a NASCAR driver being killed while parking a Camry. I also flashed on George Carlin's old ironic headline, "Jacque Cousteau dies in bathtub accident."
hope hes ok, but I find him to be annoying.
has tons of money and nothing better to do than to do something to "get himself" in the limelight and get his name and pic in the news every so often.
must have a major ego? or needs a life? or both?
anyway, hope they find him, it's not looking good.
has tons of money and nothing better to do than to do something to "get himself" in the limelight and get his name and pic in the news every so often.
must have a major ego? or needs a life? or both?
anyway, hope they find him, it's not looking good.
Apparently he was wearing a Breitling Emergency watch, which should also emit an emergency frequency.
Googling for Missing Fossett
From CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/11/fossett.search.ap/index.html
Isn't this sort of, well, stupid? Aren't Google's and Yahoo's and the different publicly available satellite photography of regions, especially non-urban, low-populations regions not updated all that often? For example, using Google's satellite map for our street, the same car as been parked in front of our townhouse for a year, although that car is never there anymore and obviously belonged to some one a while back when the photograph was last updated. And we're in a large urban area where building and development is ongoing, for which you would expect more frequent updates.
So isn't it highly unlikely Google would have a satellite photo available to the public current enough to show the wreckage of Fossett's plane?
From CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/11/fossett.search.ap/index.html
Isn't this sort of, well, stupid? Aren't Google's and Yahoo's and the different publicly available satellite photography of regions, especially non-urban, low-populations regions not updated all that often? For example, using Google's satellite map for our street, the same car as been parked in front of our townhouse for a year, although that car is never there anymore and obviously belonged to some one a while back when the photograph was last updated. And we're in a large urban area where building and development is ongoing, for which you would expect more frequent updates.
So isn't it highly unlikely Google would have a satellite photo available to the public current enough to show the wreckage of Fossett's plane?
didn't read the link, but yeah, those maps aren't updated that often. . . unless someone pulled some strings to get updated sat pics of the area
The only way I could see this being at all useful is if they were using the older Google satellite images to rule out certain debris sightings as Fossett's crash site.
When the news about Google helping first came out last week, it was mentioned that they were working with their satellite vendor to get recent photos of the area, but there wasn't a scheduled fly-over until this past weekend. I assume they have some new photos now, but I'm not sure if they're available to the general public on the Google Maps site. I would think not.
That's what I thought. This would be a kind of non-story story about Hey, look what folks are doing with the Internet. Ruling out debris or geological formations that could mimic the appearance of a plane crash makes sense; but I'd think the average Web surfer isn't qualified to even point these out -- they'd get a million phone calls and e-mails -- let alone rule them out.
Overwhelming odds are that hurrying to find him in time, the only change in outcome will be the condition of his corpse when they find him. Sad, but true. He almost surely died in the crash or shortly thereafter.
Fossett has been missing for an entire week now. Unless he's pulled an Aimee Semple McPherson (look it up!), I don't expect he'll be found alive.
Oh joy. Making current satellite photography not requiring a top secret security clearance virtually useless even to experts in search/rescue image analysis.
Flat out his distress transponder or transmitter should have been manually activated when he knew he was going down hard or automatically after the crash. If the crash was so severe it destroyed the distress unit, which should have been pretty well shielded, it's possible he survived but unlikely.
I'd say you or I might not make it an entire week in the wild, but Fossett might, if he was carrying at least some water or located a nearby clean water source. But I still think he died of injuries sustained in the crash.
As for McPherson, similar but different, you know how many people who died in WTC 9/11 or Katrina who are living somewhere in the world under an assumed name? At least a few. Every large multi-fatality, missing-body disaster at least couple people use it as an opportunity to drop out, run away and start over.
