[VOA]

She said: "I've been doing this search and rescue for 14 years.
Fossett should have been found.
"It's not like we didn't have our eyes open.

Just about anything is possible:
1. sitting at the bottom of a lake/river
2. flew so wildly off-course he's might be even BARELY outside the
search area
3. high-speed crash into a mountain-side when fuel was low, so the
debris falls in little-bitty pieces under the canopy of trees
4. flow under a sizeable snowbank and won't be found until either
the debris emerges at the bottom edge of the snow bank or the
snow-bank melts (if you believe in global warming).

But...if Fossett faked his death and is living with a stable of
lady friends, all I can say is...
"It's a Man's World, Baby!".

[Oatka]

Good possibilities. Thanks. In 1971 an aircraft with 93 passengers disappeared over the Peruvian rainforest. They never spotted any wreckage (the plane disintegrated two miles up) but some 10 days later Juliane Köpcke walks out with one Helluva tale of survival.

Maybe Fossett's plane was torn apart and suffered the same fate.

[Smokin' Joe]

You left out one other possibility: They searched the wrong area.

Early reports said that Fosset's flight was to check out a dry lake bed near Eureks, Nevada for a possible land speed run.

Eureka, Nevada is on the eastern side of the state, south of Carlin. There are such features there, especially over the mountains to the East of Eureka, Nevada which have very low surface variation and might be suitable.

There are also a lot of mountains and some pretty hostile country between there and the western part of the state.

[Stonewall Jackson]

Remember a few years back when that A-10 disappeared in New Mexico/Arizona?

For a while, everyone was concerned that the pilot might have flown off with the plane for a suicide mission or to sell it to a foreign nation. A few months later, they found a small piece of the aircraft on the side of a mountain and discovered that the plane had impacted on the mountain, triggering a rock slide that completely covered the wreckage.