http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/16/us/16 ... AB417OvVrg

(I'm not certain how long this link will remain active so pasting the text here.)


Steve Fossett, Missing Adventurer, Declared Dead

By MARGALIT FOX
Published: February 16, 2008
Steve Fossett, the wealthy, record-setting adventurer who for years blithely sailed, soared and drove through all manner of danger before disappearing in September during what was meant to be a routine short flight, was declared dead Friday by a Chicago court. He was 63, and had homes in Chicago; Beaver Creek, Colo.; and Carmel, Calif.

Mr. Fossett was declared legally dead by Judge Jeffrey A. Malak of the Circuit Court of Cook County, said Mary C. Downie, a lawyer for Mr. Fossett’s widow.

At 8 a.m. on Sept. 3, 2007, Mr. Fossett took off alone from the Flying-M Ranch, near Yerington, Nev., in a Citabria Super Decathlon, a single-engine two-seater. He was scheduled to be back by noon but never returned. That evening, a search was begun, with airplanes and a helicopter scouring the wild terrain on the Nevada-California border over which he had disappeared. Mr. Fossett had filed no flight plan, and no electronic signal had been received from the plane.

The search was called off after several weeks. In late November, Mr. Fossett’s wife, Peggy, petitioned the court to have her husband declared dead. The value of his estate is said to exceed eight figures, Ms. Downie said.

A retired commodities trader who had made millions in soybean futures, Mr. Fossett was an explorer out of the great Victorian tradition, though with far better equipment. Balding, round-faced and paunchy, he did not fit the popular notion of a dashing adventurer in any era.

But his exploits were legion. He set more than a hundred world records in the skies and on the water, according to his Web site, www.stevefossett.com. (Many of these records have since been broken.)

In 2002, Mr. Fossett became the first person to circumnavigate the world solo in a hot-air balloon. In 2005, he became the first solo pilot to fly a plane around the world without stopping to refuel. In 2006, he set the nonstop distance record for an aircraft, flying solo from Florida to England — the long way — for a total of 25,766 miles. (The trip, which included two Atlantic crossings, took 76 hours, 42 minutes and 55 seconds.)

Mr. Fossett was an equally accomplished glider pilot. In 2006, he and a co-pilot, Einar Enevoldson, became the first people to fly a glider into the stratosphere, setting an altitude record of 50,671 feet. It was one of 10 world records for the glider set by Mr. Fossett, his Web site said.

At sea, Mr. Fossett, set 21 world records, among them the round-the-world speed record for vessels under sail. In 2004, aboard the Cheyenne, his 125-foot maxi-catamaran, Mr. Fossett and his crew circumnavigated the globe in 58 days, 9 hours, 32 minutes and 45 seconds, shaving nearly 6 days off the previous record.

Mr. Fossett also chased records on land. On his flight over Nevada the day he disappeared, he was believed to have been scouting locations for an attempt to break the world land-speed record, 766.6 miles an hour in a turbojet-powered car.

With Will Hasley, Mr. Fossett wrote an autobiography, “Chasing the Wind,” published by Virgin Books in 2006.

In the weeks after Mr. Fossett disappeared, his friends and family expressed their belief that he would be found alive. After all, he had survived fire, flood and a great deal else.

In August 1998, on Mr. Fossett’s fourth attempt to fly round the world in a balloon, he was sucked into a thunderstorm off Australia’s northeast coast. The capsule fell nearly 30,000 feet into the Coral Sea. But it was also on fire, set alight by the balloon’s propane burners. Mr. Fossett was still inside. Sharks were outside.

Mr. Fossett managed to grab his life raft and dive out through the capsule’s submerged hatch. He was picked up by a boat after 10 hours at sea.

Besides the dramatic dangers, there were persistent discomforts. The capsule of Spirit of Freedom, the balloon in which Mr. Fossett made many voyages, measured just 7 feet long by 5 feet wide by 5 feet high — too small to allow him to stand upright. It was also unpressurized, requiring him often to wear an oxygen mask. And if a fuel tank or burner malfunctioned, he had to climb outside, in temperatures well below zero, to fix it.

There was also the risk of being shot down. It was a vivid concern on his fifth attempt at circumnavigation, in December 1998. On that trip, Mr. Fossett, flying with Richard Branson and Per Lindstrand, was barred — too late to alter course — from entering Chinese airspace. There was the real possibility that once the three men were over China, fighter jets would fire on them.

At the last minute, diplomacy prevailed, and the men flew over China without incident. (Mr. Branson, the president of Virgin Atlantic and a former balloon racer, underwrote many of Mr. Fossett’s adventures.)

But for all the hazards, Mr. Fossett said he felt little pressure. To him, flying, sailing or soaring faster or farther or higher than anyone had done before were merely a series of logistical problems that could be satisfyingly, if expensively, worked out.

James Stephen Fossett was born on April 22, 1944, in Jackson, Tenn. He grew up in Garden Grove, Calif., in Orange County, where his father managed a soap factory. As a child, he suffered from asthma, but he pushed himself athletically. He loved hiking and other outdoor adventure.

Mr. Fossett earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford University in 1966 and an M.B.A. from Washington University in St. Louis two years later. He took a job in Chicago running the information-technology division of a department store, but was quickly bored. He decided to switch careers.

He went to work for Merrill Lynch, and later started his own brokerage firm, Lakota Trading. Mr. Fossett was also a principal in Larkspur Securities and Marathon Racing, which developed and owned much of the technology he used in his adventures.

Besides his wife, the former Peggy Viehland, whom he married in 1967, Mr. Fossett is survived by a brother, Richard L. Fossett III, and a sister, Linda G. Dansby.

Mr. Fossett had his detractors. Some critics saw him as a graying playboy, awash in a rich man’s toys. Others took him to task for deliberately courting danger, heedless of the cost to taxpayers of his various rescues. But Mr. Fossett often said that it was novelty and adventure, not danger, that he sought.

“I don’t like to be scared, and I spend a lot of effort figuring out how to reduce risks,” he told The Times of London in 2004. “The sports I’m involved in are high risk; to pursue them you have to be risk averse.”

Not all Mr. Fossett’s ventures were spectacularly successful. After swimming the English Channel in 1985, for instance, he received a trophy — for the slowest crossing of the year. He managed to scale the highest peak on every continent except Mount Everest.

Mr. Fossett also drove a dogsled in the Iditarod race in Alaska (he placed 47th); skied from Aspen to Vail, Colo. (an enterprise of nearly 60 hours); drove a Kremer Porsche 962C for 24 hours in the Le Mans sports car race; sailed an airship to a world speed record; and competed in the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii.

The only frontier on which Mr. Fossett had not made an assault was outer space. This owed, perhaps, to a reluctance to consign himself to the role of mere crewman, as he told Newsweek in 2003.

“Flying in the space shuttle would be fascinating,” Mr. Fossett said. “But I’d want to be the pilot.”

JC wrote:But his exploits were legion. He set more than a hundred world records in the skies and on the water

Not to say anything bad.... But, Mother Nature was not impressed and the mountains of western Nevada were waiting for him. This is a tough place to fly.

Gump

I was returning from Burning Man the day he disappeared. I left Winnemucca about 10:00 and took the scenic route and crossed the Sierra's over Lake Tahoe from just north of Minden, enroute to San Jose. It was clear with a strong head wind and it was very choppy over Tahoe.

Maybe he was down low and flew into a roller... but any glider pilot would know better than that. Odd thing is that no one saw it, being Labor Day w/e and the peak recreational use day of the summer. There was a lot of traffic in the air as well.

Hard to figure that they didn't find him, they found about everything else.
Humm, declared dead already, that is very unusual for a missing plane so soon... maybe they did find, something?

Maybe he's going for the world record for longest time thought to be dead, but then found?

In all seriousness though, it is pretty hard to believe they weren't able to find anything if he really did crash. IMO, he is somewhere alive and well, trying not to be found.

Hard to figure that they didn't find him, they found about everything else.
Humm, declared dead already, that is very unusual for a missing plane so soon... maybe they did find, something?

In all seriousness though, it is pretty hard to believe they weren't able to find anything if he really did crash. IMO, he is somewhere alive and well, trying not to be found.

Usually, in a cospiracy theory, there's a reason for the abnormal event which contradicts the everyday logic. Now I can see why Steve would want to fake his death...his life was shit...absolutely no fun or accomplishment at all...so he probably just wanted to leave all his debts behind and start from scratch. Ya, that makes sense.

And I can totally see why the searchers would have found proof of his demise and not told anyone about it...If I were part of that massive man hunt I'd sure as hell keep any evidence of what happened a secret. Who wouldn't? Makes perfect sense.

And hell, just the fact that no one EVER has a near-miss in the traffic pattern is enough to show that it's damn near impossible for a plane flying over Nevada to dissapear on a busy weekend....they're just too easy to see!

And if a couple hundred people cant find a piece of wreckage the size of a BBQ in mountainous, vegetation covered country the size of TX after looking for several weeks, well, they must not have been trying very hard.

Sorry for the sarcasm, but some people would make a national conspiracy out of the post office selling you stamps, then using them to send your mail. If there's any conspiracy here it's that all of those searchers somehow deluded themselves into thinking that, given the search parameters, they had a pudding-pop's chance in hell of finding him. [/quote]

Hammer wrote: all of those searchers somehow deluded themselves into thinking that, given the search parameters, they had a pudding-pop's chance in hell of finding him.

I live, fly, and four-wheel in the middle of the Fossett search area. Those not familiar with this terrain have no clue as to just how rugged and remote this part of North America is. Without an ELT going off or an extremely narrowed down search area, it's going to be nothing but pure chance that Fossett and that Decathalon are ever found.

The morning he disappeared I was on my four-wheeler riding the southern edge of Flying M Ranch, and up into the old ghost towns of Bodie and Masonic, just east of Bridgeport, CA. The winds were howling down the canyons, and on the ridgetops it was hard to stand it was blowing so hard. Not a good day to be poking one's nose up a canyon in a gutless airplane.

One doesn't "set hundreds of aviation records" without a whole lot of ego at work. I'm not a betting man, but I do play flying odds on a regular basis, and I'm pretty good at it. My money is always on the laws of physics and Mother Nature over ego and ambition.

Gump

I was wondering if the "something" found might have been in his medical records, indicating the possibility of a stroke or heart attack. That would explain a fatal crash, especially considering the wicked winds that day.