The writer doesn’t know Nevada, obviously. Had his plane gone down in the desert, he and it would have been found. He was lost in the MOUNTAINS of Nevada ... huge difference. Nevada is a very mountainous state ... I’ve heard the most mountainous. AND the reason that lost planes are found decades after the crash.
It’s also appalling that six planes were found during the search for Fossett ... guess those pilots weren’t well-known enough for bigger searches.
That’s what I’ve tried to tell people here on FR - Nevada is a very, very rugged state north of US-6. Most people think all of Nevada is what they see when they visit Las Vegas. Not true. The area north of US-6 is very rugged, whereas the area south of US-6 is wide open low desert.
Light planes go down in Nevada all the time. There are searches mounted. What people from urbanized states, especially the coasts, don’t understand is how big the country is, how few people there are to assist in the search, and how rugged the terrain is. Searches are conducted, efforts are made, but crash sites in rugged box canyons, or across mountaintops are just not easy to spot from the air and it takes a long time to search even a relatively small area of these mountain ranges.
What I find most amusing are flatlanders spouting off about how easy it would be to conduct these searches. After years of hunting chukar, deer, mountain goats, etc up in the mountains of Nevada, there’s one thing that amuses me most of all: watching flatlanders in the mountains, especially above 7,000’. They take a step. Then they suck wind for five minutes. Another step, more sucking. Repeat until they’ve done maybe 1,000 elevation gain in a day, when they’d have to do 4,000 to get to the top of the range.
I won’t even bother to detail how their fashionable modern hiking boots (made from silly synthetic materials and glue) get shredded in the rock slides, scree and talus slopes in Nevada.