LAS VEGAS: As the search for the wealthy adventurer Steve
Fossett entered its third day, rescue crews and aviation experts
expressed bafflement Wednesday at his disappearance and the
inability to find him.
They pointed out that Mr. Fossett was a highly skilled pilot
who was flying on a clear day over familiar terrain when his
single-engine aircraft vanished Monday morning in rural western
Nevada on what was to have been a brief flight.
More than a dozen aircraft have been used to scour a mountainous
area south of Reno since the search began in earnest at 6 p.m.
Monday, but so far there has been no sign of Mr. Fossett or
the blue and white Citabria Super Decathlon he was flying.
What is more, officials say, they have not detected the emergency
locator beacon that should have automatically gone off in the
event of a crash, or that could have been enabled by Mr. Fossett
himself if he was capable.
"This is kind of strange, because these aircraft have transponders
and emergency locators and you can usually readily find them
anywhere in the world, including under the sea," said Ross Aimer,
chief executive of Aviation Experts, a consulting firm in San
Clemente, Calif., who has flown the region several times. "This
guy is totally lost in what I would say is not a no man's land.
So far, nobody's heard the electronic location beacon. That
sounds to me very, very strange."
Will Hasley, co-author of the 2006 memoir "Chasing the Wind:
The Autobiography of Steve Fossett," called the disappearance
and the inability to locate Mr. Fossett a "mind-blowing thing."
"I can't figure this out," because although the area is largely
mountainous, "I think he was looking at the desert part of it"
on his flight, said Mr. Hasley, who last saw Mr. Fossett in
July when he was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of
Fame in Dayton, Ohio.
For a moment Wednesday afternoon, searchers thought they had
found Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
Mr. Fossett, 63, is a veteran aviator known for his quests
to set world records. In 2002, on his sixth attempt, he became
the first person to complete a solo, uninterrupted flight around
the world in a hot-air balloon. Last year he made the longest
nonstop flight in aviation history: 26,389 miles in 76 hours,
in a lightweight experimental plane.
He also has an application pending with the Bureau of Land
Management to try to break the land-speed record, currently
more than 766 miles an hour, in a jet-powered car in the Nevada
desert sometime next year. Mr. Hasley and others have speculated
that on his flight Monday, Mr. Fossett was scouting dry lake
beds where he could challenge that record.
Mr. Fossett, whose feats also include the climbing of the
Matterhorn and Mount Kilimanjaro, has extraordinary skills as
an outdoorsman, and Mr. Hasley said, "I'm hopeful even if he
did crash, he would be able to survive."
