American adventurer Steve Fossett never did much on a small scale. Now, extraordinary and sophisticated measures are being taken to find the lost aviator, who has been missing for nearly two weeks.
Two of America’s largest companies and tens of thousands of people - literally - are searching for Fossett.
Since Fossett disappeared, the state of Nevada has spent more than $600,000 looking for the expert pilot and world-class yachtsman. Fossett, who made a fortune in commodities trading, was last seen taking off from Barron Hilton’s sprawling Nevada ranch in a Bellanca Super Decathalon fixed wing aircraft.
Within a few days of his reported disappearance, the Civil Air Patrol dispatched as many as 14 aircraft to search for Fossett. One of the craft is equipped with the ARCHER detection system, which uses high-tech imaging to detect individual “signatures” from missing aircraft, according to Aviation Week. As a result, the Civil Air Patrol has found several previously unknown crash sites in the Nevada desert - but not Fossett.
In addition, billionaire Richard Branson, one of Fossett’s closest friends, is coordinating with Google Inc. to search for the lost aviator by using its database of satellite images. DigitalGlobe images of Nevada are being made available to the public through the Amazon Mechanical Turk, a website that allows potentially thousands of people to search the images and alert authorities to anything suspicious.
This process is called “crowdsourcing” - using huge groups to focus on a single complicated or enormous project. According to the Washington Post, a Nevada Air National Guard C-130 Hercules is searching daily for Fossett, along with helicopters including two AH-60 Black Hawks, two OH-58 Kiowas and a Chinook. The choppers chase tips from people using the crowdsourcing marketplace site.
So far, Google has spent an estimated $100,000 assisting in the search, and about 50,000 people have examined more than 300,000 images in search of Fossett and the airplane, Wired News reported.
At 63, Fossett is not an ordinary missing person. He was the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in either a plane or a balloon. (He did both.) He also swam the English channel and has climbed the highest peaks on six continents. He has nearly two dozen world records in sailing.
His wife of 40 years, Peggy Fossett, said he left on the Nevada flight without water or his watch. “I think the whole thing is extremely mysterious, mostly because of Steve’s nature,” Peter McMillan, an owner of the open-cockpit biplane Fossett co-piloted across the Atlantic two years ago, told the Washington Post. “He’s definitely a risk-taker, but the risks are very, very calculated.”
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