Steve Fossett may be alive, investigator claims Adventurer Steve Fossett, who has not been seen since last September after flying off into the skies above Nevada, may have faked his own death, investigators have claimed. Despite a massive search for Fossett and his Bellanca Citabria Super Decathalon, no trace of either has ever been found. Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia Ryan of …
"...We found six other planes while we were looking for him. We're pretty good at what we do."
They accidentally found six other planes which they could not find when they were searching for them on purpose. Is that a definition of being good at what they do???
So, perhaps they should look for someone else in order to find Fosset's plane?
If I was a zillionaire and wanted to fake my death, I wouldn't be worried about the value of one crummy little plane. I'd make sure the wreckage was found (added points for a body burnt beyond recognition/DNA matching). However, with the amount of money he had, I seriously doubt that even the best auditor could spot a few mil. missing from anywhere in the estate - especially if SF had time to prepare things.
We found six other planes while we were looking for him.
Can't be that fucking good then eh? Otherwise you'd have found the others when they went missing.
So it's more like "We're pretty good at what we do when it's someone famous we're looking for, otherwise we generally don't give a shit."
mmmm could be right,
I have been asking for ages why he was looking for new land speed records sites, what's wrong with the existing ones. It just seems to be a pretty lame excuse to head off into the wilderness on your lonesome.
Hope they find him alive and well.... then nail him to the mast for fraud.
"None of Steve's wealth was transferred out or withdrawn in any manner that would suggest a planned disappearance. Steve has not accessed any of his assets since his disappearance."
Perhaps because he's living in a bedsit next door to his missus accessed by a secret door which he bolts through when ever the rozzers come to the door!
Nah, too ridulcuous to be true ;)
Nobody was looking for them before now because they weren't being flown by Fossett.
Their owners' estates should be fined for "flying while not a millionaire." (Not unlike Driving While Black.")
Hackneyed cliché: Paris, because she would never fly while not a millionaire.
So why didn't they find those 6 planes when they searched for whoever was lost flying them? Kind of blows her argument out of the water. Maybe they'll just find Fossett's when they go looking for someone else.
Happens all the times when I've lost my keys - find something else I thought I'd lost...
Paris - cos I wish she was faking her own death...
M
having just had canoe man sentenced to prison in the uk this guy keeps the conspiracy of death faking alive.
"Steve has not accessed any of his assets since his disappearance"
So he wasn't a dumbass and probably had 2 accounts then eh? not unusual.... I do like the investigator though:
"I don't really care if he is alive or dead, it make no difference to me"
That's what I like to see, someone who has no affiliation, who focuses on the facts. I'd mention Grissom but I know half of you will cringe and flame me with FAKE, but you get my drift. Will keep on eye on this one for curiosity sake
I am talking completely not out of my head, but I do agree, it is suspicious. When you know someone left with a plane, and neither ever shows again, and you have combed the area 10m times, and found a lot of condoms, even 6 other light planes, one can guess he never started. That pilot at Barron Hilton's Flying M Ranch is the first suspect, especially after that miserable first-time flight preparation story.
Ask my old friend Columbo to have an interview with him.
Paris, because maybe Fossett decided to fly there
"We found six other planes while we were looking for him. We're pretty good at what we do."
in other words we are sooooo good we didnt find SIX PLANES the last time we looked...
i wonder how hard they would look if i went missing rather than a multi-millionnaire!
the 'i cant see it so its not there' argument is always flawed when using UK and US intelligence!
The wreckage of general aviation airplanes found while searching for Fossett had disappeared many years before and did not contain high profile occupants (less likely to have extraordinary search efforts).
The tandem-seat American-Champion/Decathlon that Fossett was reportedly flying is a 'rag & tube' aircraft, sturdy, and built for aerobatics. However, if you drive one into the ground it will become a very small ball of chrome-moly tubes & poly-fabric.
On the other hand, it is odd that I've not found reference to if/why such a pilot would be without the latest personal GPS enabled ELT. The aircraft should also have had an ELT, as is mandated for certified aircraft. Aircraft ELT's are designed to activate on impact in a crash.
As I recall one was from the '50s and others had not been reported missing. Nevada is a big empty desert and one is not actually required to file a flight plan. So, unless one of the planes that they found had been searched for previously, it is really not indicative of incompetence.
Oh you mean those slitty-eyed pale looking Aliens that keep being chucked out of the USA for spying and nicking industrial secrets.
Sounds like they made him an offer he had no way of refusing.
No doubt the chinese will unveil some super high tech fancy aircraft and space-craft in due course(which wil be years ahead of US current designs).
大您好，以史蒂夫
希望你们都清楚
我们怀念你
I was driving with friends in the Mohave Desert (Joshua Tree Nat Park) the day Steve went missing and just amaized at the sheer space and emptyness of the place. The weather that day was +42C in the shade.
The deserts in Califonia / Nevada / Arizona / Colarado is absolutely massive so loosing your self is not that hard, the Mohave is about half the size of England, so looking for one light aircraft that would have left an impact crater a few meters accross is a hard job at best.
If there had been a fire then it might have been more obvious scorch marks for searchers, so my theory is Steve ran into engine problems because of a lack of fuel, the lack of a mayday (because of a loss of power) and locatable fire. If Steve did run out, he must have tried to land so my bet is that he took a chance at any reasonably flat strip of a few hundred yards long within gliding distance.
I'd love to think that he made it but whats smooth desert terain at 1000ft pretty soon becomes a bolder field at 50, by which time with no power there is no chance to 'go around' so the landing was bound to be rough at best, I think your survival chances out in the desert (in full fitness on that day) are limited at best and if he sustained any kind of injury he would have succomed pretty quickly.
To all of the "Well they didn't find those other planes before" posters:
Did you consider the possibility that, in the months after Fossett disappeared, OTHER small private planes might have crashed and that the CAP just *MIGHT* have had *CONCURRENT* searches going on?
Excerpted from Bloomberg:
"Private, or general aviation, flights are 82 times riskier than commercial airline trips and represent the overwhelming majority of aviation crashes and casualties in the United States. (...)
“In an examination of the crash risk of private flights, researchers found that general aviation flights averaged 1,685 crashes and 583 deaths each year from 2002 to 2005,"
I'm trying to be generous and assume that most of the posters taking potshots at the CAP were being "clever" (i.e. - kneejerk cynical), rather than genuinely obtuse.
Oh dear. As ever, lots of presumed guilt flying around here. I'm suprised no-one has yet stuck up a PShop'd image of the missing person yet in a Panama apartment.
Maybe someone will wonder why this is being aired now the insurance companies, after gleefully raking in his premiums, are now going to have to stick to their part of the bargain. Or is the idea that isruance companies don't play fair a bit too much of a conspiracy thory for you all?
Insurance companies will do ANYTHING to avoid having to pay out on insurance policies. Even trumping up fake evidence that someone faked their death.
That's what they get paid to do. Make unfounded accusations of fraud in order to delay as long as possible having to pay anything out on insurance polices that people purchased in good faith.
Insurance companies are scum.
Since everybody else is sticking it to CAP I'm going to go after the investigator instead. What the hell is so baffling about using a Super Decathlon? It's a marvellous aircraft for tooling around in, with docile handling and fantastic visibility, and it's designed and built with aerobatic training and competition in mind. It's a bloody strong plane. Even "easy to dismantle" is just a bit much - I'd want more than a multi-tool to take one apart and it would be a whole lot easier to just hide it in a hangar or shed somewhere.
For a "man who deals in facts" he's coming up a little bit short here.
Article:
"the only witness to his departure was a pilot at Barron Hilton's Flying M Ranch, southeast of Reno, who "claims Fossett asked him to prepare the plane for take off, even though he had never allowed anyone else to do this before"."
Wait a sec: if you were carefully planning to fake your own disappearance, surely the LAST thing you'd do is depart from your normal routine. In fact, you'd *either* go out of your way to establish a routine and then follow it so people would say "he did nothing unusual"... or you'd carefully avoid establishing a routine that people could compare to.
So really this so-called anomaly actually makes it LESS likely he's faking. Unless it's an elaborate double-bluff...
Here here.
(I don't actually know what you're banging on about, but I'm going to make out I do so that I look ded clevah)
Hmm, that's a tad strange, you seem to have posted the same random comment more than once...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/07/09/eastenders_wages_costs_ruling/comments/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/16/dell_powervault_md1120_storage_expansion/comments/
^^^ OK this one looks legit ^^^
El Reg got a DB FUBAR? ... Or just a nut-job cross-posting? ;-)
I mention Steve Fossett in a comment and up pops this the next day.
I reckon he got fed up of being asked by Sir Beardy and others to pilot plans/balloons or whatever for silly record attempts that he thought that faking his own death.
bit drastic though, he could have always changed his home number/mobile (cell) number so Beardy couldn't phone him unless he was a virgin mobile subscriber that is.
If that was the case could he not have just bought himself out of the contract?
Mine's the one with I flew Ryanair and lived to tell the tale' on the back.
IIRC, at least most of those other planes had been missing for decades - before the advent of satellite imagery for S&R operations. If they had gone down in the last 10 years they probably would have been found before now.
Right after Fossett's disappearance they ran an online distributed eyeballs search of the satellite imagery, which I participated in. I don't think it's likely that they missed anything; even cars were easily visible, and the trees in the area weren't dense enough to have hidden a recently-crashed plane.
You have to live here to understand. Nevada is 35% bigger than England, Wales and Scotland put together, and consists mainly of trackless mountains and inaccessible desert valleys. It has a total population smaller than Manchester, of which 8 out of 10 live in two cities. It's quite possible to drive 100 miles or more in the back country without sighting a human habitation, and it can take days to hike off-road to look at something that may have been spotted from the air. There are ALL KINDS of things out there in the hills, from crashed B-52s to abandoned tanks, many having been found at one time and then lost again. So the thing that surprises me is that ONLY six other planes were found, and these may not have been "new", just forgotten.
See <http://www.aviationarchaeology.com/fossett.htm> for similar remarks.
I live 20 miles from the Mojave Desert here in San Bernardino County, California, USA. Steve Fossett was at least 300- 400 miles north of here, and there are no dry lake beds for perusal in search of land-speed records amidst the Joshua Trees. Of course, we have the Rogers Dry Lake Bed, where I've seen the Space Shuttle land. But, those dry lake beds are a dime a dozen, and well-used already for land speed records. Joshua trees don't like to be crowded - there is at least 20 feet between each tree (required for survival in a parched land). Therefore, you could spot a 3" x 3" "Post It Note" on the ground from 500-1,000 feet. Fossett is not amidst the Joshua trees.
I say grill the so-called "witnesses" to a greater degree. And Cynthia Ryan of the Civil Air Patrol, with her candor and recent elevation in rank, has been the only true, honest, forthcoming voice in this entire saga. She shoots from the hip. She even went so far as to accept the "something smells wrong" theory.
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