(Note: This piece ran on 9/10/07 in the Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle. This is the Chronicle's version.)

Sept. 10, 2007

Search for Fossett turns up wrecks of 8 other small planes

[Hear Friess' Fossett podcast, including a Richard Branson chat, here]

BY STEVE FRIESS

Minden, Nev: An experienced pilot takes off in a single-engine plane on a clear day for a short flight to the Sierra Nevada and is never heard from again. Officials search for him without success, and his family is tormented by questions about his fate that nobody can answer.

It's a familiar story, of course, because the headlines have been flooded with the so-far-unsuccessful search for millionaire aviator Steve Fossett, who took to the air Sept. 1 and remains missing in northern Nevada.

But this one isn't a week old; it happened 43 years ago. And the massive hunt for Fossett may help resolve the enduring mystery surrounding Charles Ogle, then 41, who lifted off from Oakland in August 1964 but vanished en route to Reno.

The search for Fossett across a 17,000-square-mile swath of the Sierra Nevada has revealed the wreckage of eight other small planes that had never, until now, been discovered. And each of those crash sites holds clues to the fates of other fliers who went missing in what is starting to look like the Bermuda Triangle of the western United States.

When they learned of the other wrecks, Ogle's survivors immediately thought their own decades-long search might be over. Based on what the family has learned of his flight path, they advised the Civil Air Patrol Nevada Wing that one of them might be the debris of Ogle's plane.

It's too soon to determine the identity of those wrecks, as rescuers are focused on finding Fossett, holder of more than 110 world records of land, sea and air, who took off for what was to be a brief jaunt from a ranch 90 miles southeast of Reno and never returned.

But relatives of Ogle are hoping that when crews return to those newly found sites and examine them for clues, they may yield the answers that they've sought since Lyndon Johnson was president.

"This has hung over me my whole life," said William Ogle, 47, of Gainesville, Fla., who was 4 when his father disappeared. "I don't remember the emotional impact because I was too young, but my teachers would complain to my mother because I would look out the windows all the time looking for his plane. I just thought he didn't come down yet."

It was as good a guess as any. Charles "Chazzie" Ogle, who learned to fly while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War, departed without a flight plan from what was then known as Metropolitan Oakland International Airport on Aug. 12, 1964, in his four-seat Cessna 210, according to the account in the Oakland Tribune a month later. The article referred to Ogle as "a land investor with a Midas touch" who was involved in more than $12 million - in 1964 dollars - worth of construction of four nursing homes and a high-rise condo in the Bay Area.

When he wasn't heard from, the Western Air Rescue Center at the now-defunct Hamilton Air Force Base in Novato searched for 60 hours before giving up.

For decades, Ogle's family didn't even know where he was heading. In 1985, William Ogle tracked down a woman seen near the plane before his father departed who turned out to be his father's then-pregnant mistress. The elder Ogle, who was in the process of divorcing his wife, told the woman he was heading to Reno for a business meeting and invited her to go along. She declined.

Little is known about the eight crashes spotted in the past week, because searchers have swooped in only long enough to ascertain they were not Fossett's plane, said Civil Air Patrol spokeswoman Maj. Cynthia Ryan. The Fossett mission involves dozens of planes including state and federal aircraft as well as some owned by private volunteers, hundreds of ground searchers and new technology that can scan the rough, dense terrain with more than 15 times the detail of the naked eye.

"Yeah, there are special resources being devoted to this because of who he is," Ryan said at a news briefing last week. "We wouldn't have a Cessna Citation at our disposal unless it came from (hotel magnate) Barron Hilton's ranch. So yeah, there are some differences, let's not be coy about that. But the basics of what you see here today is what we devote to every search."

If it helps clear up Ogle's mysterious disappearance, his now-83-year-old sister Marian Brumett of Dale, Ind., is relieved. For more than half her life, she's wondered every time she heard about a small-plane crash in the news what happened to her brother. She recalls that her father, a cattle farmer, made his first trip to California in the days after Ogle's disappearance and hired private investigators who turned up nothing.

"There were a lot of theories at the time," Brumett said. "Maybe he just wanted to start over and flew down to Mexico? They simply didn't know. He left two young children. My father knew if he was still alive, Chazzie would have contacted him. They were so close."

It took 11 years to get Charles Ogle legally declared dead, and in the meantime the family moved from a suburban home into an apartment paid for by welfare. His wife, Violette, 82, who never remarried and today lives in Mill Valley, eventually became a school secretary in Castro Valley. Her son said she would not comment for this report.

The disappearance also left many in the family with a fear of flying. William Ogle, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida, says that fear intensified when he had a son, now 7.

There was never a funeral or memorial for Charles Ogle, so the closure provided if one of those Nevada wrecks is his would be welcome. But even if not, the fact that Fossett crashed and has not been found despite all his expertise and all the effort also provides a strange comfort to the family.

"The Fossett thing sort of brings it home - the difficulty of finding someone when they go down on a small plane," Ogle said. "If this could happen to him, it sort of makes me feel better about what happened to my father. It happened to a super pilot, not just a weekend pilot like my dad."

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