"Tard" refers to the ping list members and not to the subject of the thread.
Posted on 09/09/2007 8:10:36 AM PDT by Daffynition
ping
He crashed in a lake...so no visible wreckage.
“Help Find Steve Fossett”
Goes to show that even multibillionaires are morons.
Should have filed a flight plan.
Prayers to the family.
That’s seems to be a viable theory being reported.
I think I last saw him in the movie An Officer and a Gentleman.
Haven’t they been using sonor?
Are there many lakes there?
Will ask husband/pilot to review later. Thanks.
After Jim Gray, a Technical Fellow for Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley, was lost at sea in January, Amazon set up its Mechanical Turk service to let the public help examine Digital Globe satellite photos of the ocean outside San Francisco Bay for signs of Gray's sailboat. Unfortunately, Gray was never found.
I spent an evening going through these images on the Turk service because I knew who Gray was (coincidentally, his home page at Microsoft Research was the first entry in my "People" bookmarks collection) and because I was curious about the process.
Saturday night, I heard that Google and Amazon had set up a similar process to help in the search for Steve Fossett, so I spent some time reviewing those images. This time, there was an extra dimension-- a section of the imagery (again from Digital Globe) was uploaded to Google Earth so people working on searches through the Turk service could see the search images in context.
None of the images I reviewed contained anything resembling an airplane, but I suppose negative results are worth something too. I had marked several images during the search for Jim Gray, but I think that's because a line of whitecaps can easily look like a sailboat in low-res satellite images. The cross-like shape of an airplane is less likely to appear in nature.
Another difference in the search for Fossett is that there's much more natural clutter in the land of the American southwest, so I found it took significantly longer on average to review each image just to satisfy myself that there was no sign of aircraft partially concealed by trees or terrain.
Oddly, the one area of satellite imagery available in Google Earth was in a section of California just across the Nevada border from where Fossett took off, and in a direction where I saw no large flat areas-- Fossett had said he was scouting for areas to set land-speed records, so presumably he wouldn't be spending time around mountains, at least on purpose.
But I suppose the searchers have to focus their efforts on the areas near where Fossett took off, at least to begin with. Ultimately, however, the search may have to extend much farther. Fossett's plane reportedly has a range of over 560 miles, meaning he could have come down anywhere in a million-square-mile area. On the other hand, I trust someone is trying to deduce what courses Fossett may have set given his plans, then follow those courses out to where Fossett might have encountered mountains or run out of gas. I thought about looking in such areas myself via Google Earth, but there doesn't appear to be any recent imagery other than that one section of California.
Anyway, I very much hope that Fossett will be found alive as soon as possible. He's a remarkably accomplished fellow, doing the sorts of things I imagine I'd do if I had that kind of money, and I hope he's able to continue.
Now, there's thinking outside the box.
I wasn't aware that hi res photography was available that easily over large areas.
It's worth a shot.
I've always been fascinated by photointerpretation, having worked with aerial pictures all by life in the use of topography.
Certainly worth a shot.
"Tard" refers to the ping list members and not to the subject of the thread.
Surely, someone must have seen which direction he started after he took off...
Even the tiniest clue helps.
It would also help to know what areas have already been searched in real time.
All I get using that link is two very dark (black?) squares.
What am I doing wrong?
Yes, I had Google Earth already on my computer.
That is currently a working theory, not a fact.
Officials say the terrain of western Nevada's high desert is making the search for Steve Fossett especially tough.
Crews will return to the skies today over a greatly expanded search area, with little clue of where Fossett and his plane might be.
Fossett has been missing since Monday, when he took off from a private airstrip southeast of Reno. He did not file a flight plan.
Rescue teams are expanding the territory in which they are looking for missing aviator Steve Fossett to 10,000 square miles across California and Nevada, an area the size of Massachusetts.
They also announced today they will be searching a lake in northwestern Nevada, using sonar to determine whether the multimillionaire adventurer might have crashed and submerged beneath its surface.
Air crews are making multiple passes over the same areas but at different times of the day so they can see them under different conditions. The jagged peaks and steep canyons of the region cast shadows that can interfere with the views of search crews.
The search area is 200 to 300 miles wide and stretches 120 miles south from Yerington, Nevada, to Bishop, California, on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada.
Ryan said the search now also includes the Black Rock Desert far to the north, the site of the annual counterculture Burning Man gathering.
Authorities said at one point late Wednesday they thought they had spotted Fossett's plane and sent in a helicopter crew to confirm. Nevada Civil Air Patrol Major Cynthia Ryan told reporters "Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of many dozen unmapped wreck sites from previous years."
Some veteran pilots speculate Fossett may have fallen victim to the treacherous and sometimes deadly winds that roll over the Sierra Nevada and squeeze through the narrow canyons of the high desert plateau.
The Civil Air Patrol says maximum resources are being used in the search effort. Ten air crafts, including six Cessna's, three helicopters and a C-130 area still up in the air.
Searchers did locate a plane within the 600-square mile radius today, which caused a lot of excitement earlier, but it turned out to be wreckage from a previous accident.
While the search continues, an air guard transport plane is aiding in the rescue attempt. Wednesday morning, crews took off in a C-130 equipped with advanced search equipment and infrared cameras to search for any signs of Fossett.
"What the C-130 offers is a large picture area and video capability," April Conway with the Nevada National Guard said. "They can take a picture of something and go back if something might look a little odd to them."
Could your browser be blocking the images? ... ‘coz it works fine for me on Firefox. I’m sorry I can’t help you ... I’m not tech savvy. ;-(
It is a long way to anywhere out there, and there was little water I remember aside from the occasional stock tank.
Distances are generally difficult to estimate as well, sagebrush does not lend itself to accurate estimation as trees might, and it is really easy to significantly underestimate how far it is from where you are standing to a point in the distance.
Whatever is there now, was not there in the original sat image.
A little more information would certainly help to be systematic about it.
So far I did 30 images. I found Amelia Earhart and Jimmy Hoffa, but no Steve Fossett yet.
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