Posted on 09/09/2007 5:12:21 PM PDT by IsraelBeach
Google, Paris Hilton, Ebay, Britney Spears, Internet Marketing Used To Find Steve Fossett
By Joel Leyden
Israel News Agency
Jerusalem ---- September 9, 2007 ...... On September 3, 2007, adventurer Steve Fossett, 63, the first person to fly a plane around the world without refueling in 2006, the first person to fly around the world in a hot-air balloon in 2002 went missing in Nevada. Fosset took off on a solo flight from a private airstrip 80 miles (130 kilometers) southeast of Reno, Nevada. The Bellanca single engine aircraft he was flying failed to return. No one has any idea where he is.
A tireless athlete, Fosset has swum the English Channel, climbed the Matterhorn and Mount Kilimanjaro, raced in the Ironman Triathlon and completed the grueling 1,165 mile (1,887-kilometer) Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race across Alaska. Now Fosset was said to be searching for dry lake beds where he could challenge and break the land-speed record of 766 miles an hour in a jet-powered car.
Yesterday, a total of 45 aircraft, including around a dozen volunteer pilots, were involved in the hunt for Fossett, rescue officials said.
Rescuers do not believe Fossett had packed food and water aboard his plane because he had only planned a three-hour flight.
Fossett's single-engine Bellanca aircraft was equipped with an electronic tracking device designed to be triggered in the event of a rough landing, but it has not been activated.
On Wednesday, searchers thought they had found Steve Fossett.
“We thought we had it nailed,” but the wreckage that was spotted turned out to be years old, said Maj. Cynthia S. Ryan, a spokeswoman for the Civil Air Patrol Nevada Wing, speaking at an afternoon news conference in the town of Minden, whose airport is the base for the search.
Minden is just west of Yerington, the town closest to the Flying-M Ranch, an exclusive retreat owned by the hotel magnate William Barron Hilton, where Fossett took off from a private airstrip Monday morning. His wife of more than 30 years, Peggy, stayed behind, awaiting his return so they could leave Nevada together on a private jet later in the day.
Underscoring the vastness of the area being searched, officials said spotter planes have so far found wreckage from six previously unrecorded crash sites, while the area has been described as an "aircraft graveyard."
Rescue crews spotted an object today southeast of the private ranch where Steve Fossett was staying 80 miles southeast of Reno when he took off last Monday for what was supposed to be a three-hour flight. Authorities did not say what the sighting was, only that it wasn't Fossett's plane.
The false alarm further dampened spirits of the rescuers, whose chances of finding the 63-year-old Fossett alive in the rugged, concealing landscape of western Nevada are becoming more and more slim.
Without driving down to the nearest airport and catching a flight to Nevada. Without getting on board a rescue aircraft, braving uncertain weather, flying over dangerous terrain, and getting dizzy from high altitude as you attempt to keep binoculars pinned to your face, you need only to turn on your computer to assist in Fosset's search.
Satellite images of the search area in western Nevada provided by DigitalGlobe, the company that supplies images to Google Earth, are now available online.
An aviation Web site, avweb.com, provides links to review fresh satellite images and instructions on how to look for Steve Fossett's plane or any image that might resemble a small aircraft.
After being shown a satellite image, viewers are asked to check one of two boxes.
One says the image "contains foreign objects that should be looked at more closely." Viewers then will be asked to describe them.
The other box says the image contains nothing of interest.
Fossett's plane should show up as a regular object with sharp edges, white or nearly white, possibly contrasting with the surrounding landscape, according to the Web site.
Tips deemed reliable by a team of specialists will be passed on to authorities.
Now you may be asking what does Paris Hilton, Ebay and Britney Spears have to do with this rescue?
Paris Whitney Hilton is an American celebutante, businesswoman, model, actress and recording artist. Paris Hilton is an heiress to a share of both the Hilton Hotel fortune and the real estate fortune of her father Richard Hilton. And her name - Paris Hilton - is the number one searched keyword used on Google and Google News.
eBay is The World's Online Marketplace®, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis. eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) is an American Internet company that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website where people and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide. In addition to its original U.S. website, eBay has established localized websites in several other countries. eBay Inc also owns PayPal, Skype, and other businesses. eBay ranks in the top five keyword searches on Google.
Britney Spears is a Grammy Award-winning American pop music singer, songwriter, dancer, and author. Britney Spears has sold over seventy-six million albums worldwide according to Time Magazine. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) ranks Britney Spears as the eighth best-selling female artist in American music history, having sold thirty-one million albums in the US. Britney Spears also ranks in the top five searches on Google.
As a journalist and as a seasoned Internet marketing, SEO (search engine optimization) professional, we know that many people world wide are still unaware that Steve Fosset, an American hero and global legend is missing.
The Israel News Agency is also aware that the more people who come across and read this optimized news story, the more people will search Google Earth images. If Internet marketing and SEO can be used to sell cars, real estate, dating, sex sites, video games, jobs, elections, sports and music, it can also be used to save Steve Fosset's life.
Sir Richard Branson, Fossett's partner in a number of his aviation adventures, said he was hoping to help find the adventurer using Google Earth, the satellite mapping service offered by the Internet search giant.
"I'm talking with friends at Google about seeing whether we can look at satellite images over the last four days to see whether they can see which direction he might have been flying and whether they can see any disturbances anywhere that they can pin from space," the British billionaire told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Steve Fossett is a survivalist. Fossett has survived numerous near-misses and harrowing crash landings over the years, including a 29,000-foot (9,000-meter) plummet into the Coral Sea off Australia because of a storm-shredded balloon.
Let's pray that Fossett used his professional expertise in gliding his aircraft down onto a highway, dirt road or desert dry lake bed and is having the last laugh. Even so, every precious second spent that we, from the comfort of our homes and offices, search Google Earth and discover a white foreign object in that dark, unforgiving desert may bring an injured, hungry and brave Steve Fossett back to us.
Brandon Keim of Wired.com sums it up pretty well. "In a sense it seems strange to emphasize Fosset's plight in a world full of suffering, but in another sense it's a profoundly human impulse, for he's at once a person and a symbol of our eternal quest to push the envelope of speed and time. Good luck, Steve."
Ugh. My mind immediately went to: "a three hour tour..."
Sorry.
Is there anybody searching on the ground?
Well, in that case, they’d better start checking unmapped islands off of Honolulu.
Send in the IRS, they’ll find him.
Yah, well, I don't think so. The sinking feeling was how a short trip can turn into a long journey -- I pray he continues to be the survivor-type mentioned here.
“Send in the IRS, they’ll find him.”
Maybe that is why he disappeared...........
All joking aside, please forward this tragic news story to as many people that you can. Steve has a better chance of being found through Google Earth images by thousands of Internet surfers than by air rescue. Go for it!
As do we all.
Or his college alumni association.
Same thing came to mind... Deeply embedded in our once young minds...
The Google Earth pictures over my house for example are three years old...
Glad I'm not the only one.
When you participate, you download current photos of the search area and view them in Google Earth.
Google Earth images tend to be several years old. I don't think they'd be of much use. He might want to ask the NSA...
Google requested an updated satellite pass over the area. The new images have been available for the past few days as a download into Google Earth.
They're also using the new images for the search via Amazon.com's "Mechanical Turk" project: Steve Fossett Missing: Help find him by searching satellite imagery
It is pretty cool. The Google Earth image seems to be different from the search images though.
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