Just heard on the news they are going to start looking for Steve Fossett

I know some of you guys live close to that area....Have they received new leads? Seems with all the effort and even sat pics they would have found something by now.

p

Yup, there bringing in camera crews and professional survivalist's to scour the country side indeed thinking they will find him.

You could be 25 ft away in that part of the country and never see a crash site.

They would have better luck looking in Aruba or Ireland.

Every time I head out there I will look....Instant legend if you find that guy,You may even get an invite out to that million acre place Hiltons got. That would be cool.

We had to look for an M-60 machine gun that had fallen out of an UH-60 once in the Big Bend area of Texas. Took us a couple of day's to find it. Ground search teams had walked past it twice and a guy in an OH-58 saw it sticking out of a mesquite bush. You can be looking dead straight at something and not see it. How many times have you been looking for traffic, then catch a glimpse of a reflection off of the canopy or something and then all of the sudden you see the whole aircraft, clear as day?

Has anyone on this site been to Baron Hilton's spread? A German friend of mine had one of his friends get invited for about a two week deal. Sounds wild. It seems you have to have set some sort of aviation record inorder to get the invite. John

patrol guy wrote:Has anyone on this site been to Baron Hilton's spread? A German friend of mine had one of his friends get invited for about a two week deal. Sounds wild. It seems you have to have set some sort of aviation record inorder to get the invite. John

I live in a valley adjacent to the Flying M Ranch and have flown over it in the past. No invites to any of the activities, though. You can actually drive through the ranch on a public road.

patrol guy wrote:Has anyone on this site been to Baron Hilton's spread?

Good place for the first BCAH fly in

Tim

jmtgt wrote:I wanna know who is flipping the bill.

Us. We always pay.

jmtgt wrote:

Fisherman wrote:Us. We always pay.

If that is the case I am gonna be pissed off. What a waste. Sorry the man is dead but what about the rest of the un-found aviators remains that have never been found? The amount of money and effort put in to this search really upset a lot of people in this state.

IF it is a privately funded search then the best of luck to their efforts.

Don't be pissed .... private funding (from S.F. Chronicle):

A team of Canadian adventurers on Monday will launch a renewed search in the eastern Sierra Nevada for Steve Fossett, the wealthy around-the-world balloonist and aviation record-chaser whose small plane vanished during a routine flight over remote desert and mountain terrain 10 months ago.

Simon Donato, a 32-year-old Calgary geologist and self-described "elite adventure racer," has pulled together a dozen endurance athletes who specialize in racing through wilderness areas. They are all set to scour a 38-square- mile sector of rugged terrain on the eastern flank of the Sierra, halfway between Yosemite and the Lake Tahoe region.

Donato set up mobile headquarters near the resort town of Bridgeport (Mono County), along U.S. Highway 395, the mountain route Fossett might have been tracing when the plane went down. His Bellanca Super Decathlon, a single-engine stunt plane he had borrowed from hotel magnate Barron Hilton, disappeared during the sun-drenched morning of Sept. 3, after taking off from Hilton's private Nevada ranch. Fossett had left no flight plan.

The disappearance triggered a large-scale 17-day aerial search that found some old air wrecks in the desert, but no sign of Fossett or his plane. The Canadian team believes that the plane may be hidden by trees or tucked in a ravine and that only an intensive ground search can spot it.

"Simon has always idolized Steve Fossett. He followed the search for him from Day One," said Victoria Ha, a Toronto independent filmmaker who has sent a crew to document the athletes' search for the missing aviator.

The Canadian group, Adventure Science, hopes to carry out its intensive ground search in two segments, the first to take 2 1/2 days and the second a few days longer. They will rely on their skills honed by exhausting, high speed treks through wilderness terrain. "They are all adventure athletes who have competed with Simon," Ha said.

Donato and his hand-picked band share a love of extreme athleticism, and, Ha said, have the physical skills needed to cover vast amounts of dangerously rugged territory on foot.

"It takes a special sort of person to do this kind of thing," Ha added. "These people feel alive when they feel at risk."

Last fall's fruitless search, led by the Nevada National Guard, with help from the Civil Air Patrol and private volunteers, surveyed 20,000 square miles. The search area radiated from Hilton's remote Flying M Ranch - about 50 miles due east of Lake Tahoe in the Nevada desert - a private playground for wealthy aviators.

A millionaire businessman, Fossett earned international fame for his relentless push to break records in aviation, ballooning and sailing. He was the first person to fly solo around the world in a balloon - succeeding on his sixth attempt. He was first to fly around the world in an airplane without refueling, and he also broke the record for the world's longest nonstop flight, 25,766 miles.

He sailed around the world in 58 days in a catamaran, another world record. At the time of his death, he was believed to be scouting for locations in the Nevada desert to make an attempt to break the world land-speed record in a jet-powered vehicle.

Fossett, who was 63 at the time he disappeared, was declared legally dead Feb. 15 by a judge in Chicago, where he had a home.

The search cost Nevada an estimated $1.6 million, a price tag that has created hard feelings in the Silver State. A state audit described the effort to find Fossett as "the largest search-and-rescue effort ever conducted for a person within the U.S."

Gov. Jim Gibbons requested that Peggy Fossett, the adventurer's widow, pay $487,000 to defray costs of the search. She declined, citing the $1 million in private funds spent to find him. The state received an unsolicited $200,000 contribution from Barron Hilton.

The Canadian adventurers plan to carry out their work on a shoestring - just $20,000, according to a newsletter for the Calgary Search and Rescue Association. The team members are spending their own money, and hope the documentary film will bring in some revenue.

Donato's quest is motivated in part by a tip from an unnamed private searcher who had been hired by Peggy Fossett during the frantic effort to find her husband's plane. Donato pooled information from that searcher, as well as reports from the massive effort by the Nevada National Guard, and zeroed in on a relatively small patch of territory in Mono County, near the Nevada border. The area is bounded on the north by the Sweetwater Mountains and on the south by the Bodie Hills, east of Bridgeport Reservoir.

"It is typical Great Basin pine and juniper forest," said Jeff Weise, wilderness manager for the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, where much of the search area lies. Weise said he had not heard a thing about the Canadians' plans, but he well remembers the weeks after Fossett's plane disappeared.

"We saw a lot of planes overhead," he said. "The Sweetwater Mountains and the Bodie Hills are definitely places where people can get lost. It is big country, when you are looking for something as small as an airplane."

In addition to piñon and juniper forests, the region - which ranges in height from 6,500 to more than 10,000 feet - is laced with steep canyons and ravines that could swallow an airplane from view.

edited........ oops beat me to it.

Who paid for all those US Navy ships to look for the John Kennedy JR lobster bait. I am sure they would do the same for the gun trader.

Tim

qmdv wrote:Who paid for all those US Navy ships to look for the John Kennedy JR lobster bait. I am sure they would do the same for the gun trader.

I reread this statement several times and was unable to detect any cycnism or sarcasm!

qmdv wrote:

patrol guy wrote:Has anyone on this site been to Baron Hilton's spread?

Good place for the first BCAH fly in

Tim

Tim,

I already offered Mr. Hilton a membership via email. I'm waiting for his response. Hopefully he'll meet our rather stringent requirements for membership.

In the mean time, I ran across a mildly interesting site www.aircraftwrecks.com .

HHHHMMMMM....Maybe they'll find D. B. Cooper ...and some of HIS money?8)

So, how long before we have to go looking for those nuts?

a64pilot wrote:So, how long before we have to go looking for those nuts?

No kiddin' !!!

I think I saw him in Punta San Francisquito. He had a drink in his hand, toes in the sand and a beautiful girl.