Steve Fossett
 

Sad day when he want missing. I'm not sure that finding his plane and parts is any better.



10-02) 09:41 PDT MAMMOTH LAKES, MONO COUNTY -- The wreckage of a plane found near Mammoth Lakes has been confirmed to be that of adventurer Steve Fossett, who has been missing for more than a year, authorities said today.
No body has been found, but investigators said it was unlikely Fossett survived.

A preliminary investigation showed that the plane Fossett was piloting slammed into the west side of the Minaret mountain range in the Inyo National Forest at the 9,700-foot elevation, about seven miles west of Mammoth Lakes. The wreckage of the acrobatics-style Bellanca Super Decathlon airplane was initially spotted late Wednesday by a Yosemite National Park helicopter.

"It was a head-on crash into the side of a mountain, into a rock," Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said at a news conference. "The plane disintegrated. We found the engine 300 feet from the fuselage."

Fossett was 63 when he took off on a pleasure flight from a private airport in Yerington, Nev., south of Reno on Sept. 3, 2007.

"The crash looked so severe, I doubt anyone could have walked away from it," Anderson said. "It's our job to try to locate the remains and take care of those. The family deserves our best effort."

There was no black box aboard the plane that would have recorded flight data or any attempted communications from Fossett, Anderson said.

Fossett's view may have been obstructed by clouds, and his instruments may not have shown that he was approaching a mountain, the sheriff said. The cause of the crash is under investigation.

Some 50 searchers from more than a dozen agencies and five dogs are continuing to comb the site of the wreckage in the Sierra, Anderson said. The National Transportation Safety Board has joined local, state and other federal officials at the scene.

Fossett was world-renowned for setting 115 flying and sailing records, including being the first to fly around the Earth alone without refueling. The wealthy financial broker had also swum the English Channel and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, leading his friends to say that if anyone could survive an air crash, he could.

The confirmation that Fossett's plane had been found came three days after Preston Morrow, the manager of Kittredge Sports in Mammoth Lakes, found Fossett's pilot's license, a glider license and a membership card for the National Aeronautic Association while day-hiking with Kona, his Australian shepherd mix.

Morrow, 43, said today that he started his hike at Devil's Post Pile and took the Minaret Lake Trail up into the mountains. He was hoping to reach an abandoned mine, but it got late and he gave up. But he then came across the ID cards and $1,005 in cash. Authorities believe the money belonged to Fossett.

Morrow didn't know what he had found at first. It wasn't until Tuesday that he realized it was Fossett's name on the documents. He and his wife decided to go back to the site to get coordinates for the area. His wife found a sweatshirt, and he notified authorities.

The ID cards were found about a quarter-mile from the plane, Anderson said. It's possible that they landed there as a result of the impact, authorities said.

Morrow, his face showing early-morning stubble, listened to the sheriff confirm that the plane was Fossett's.

"I woke up this morning at 3 a.m. wondering, 'Wow, did I really do that? Did I find that stuff?' " Morrow said. "I'm very happy that I can help. I found the haystack, and there was that little needle they needed to go back and get. I'm glad they did.

"I'm so relieved, so happy that they found something," Morrow said. "Now they can put an end to it, I hope. Maybe the family can get some closure."

Fossett's widow, Peggy, will probably not address the media immediately, said Jeff Page, director of the Lyon County Office of Emergency Services in Nevada, where the original missing persons report for Fossett was filed.

California Highway Patrol officers had flown over the general area 19 times, Page said. There had been a number of unconfirmed sightings of possible wreckage immediately after Fossett disappeared, but they were among hundreds of tips that came in, he said.

Page said he wasn't surprised that the wreckage hadn't been spotted before. "It's very heavily forested with trees and brush," he said.

Officials said last year when the search was suspended that they believed the best chance for the wreckage to be discovered would be if a hiker came across debris by happenstance.

"We pretty much assumed something would be found either in hunting season or the peak hiking season," said Lyon County sheriff's Lt. Rob Hall. "And that's how it worked."

The original search area encompassed 25,000 square miles, one of the biggest such hunts in U.S. history.

Page noted that the wreckage had turned up nearly 200 miles south of the focus of the original searches. He shook his head as he described how search teams had been focusing their efforts in the wrong place.

"They were wrong, I guess," Page said. "So were the psychics from last year and the mind-readers and all the others who jumped in."

U.S. 395, the highway Fossett was known to fly along, passes close to Mammoth Lakes as it snakes from Canada to the Mojave Desert. Fossett had been flying in the area searching for dry lake beds where he could attempt a planned land speed record. The Sierra lakes in the area being searched are generally filled with water, said U.S. Forest Service.

Fossett vanished after taking off from the private airport - the Flying M Ranch - of his friend, hotel mogul Barron Hilton. He carried just a bottle of water on board.

The initial search teams tried to follow tips from sightings on the ground and partial radar trackings, then widened the hunt out to a huge area taking in most of the south-middle portion of Nevada. Three private teams took a cut at the hunt this summer, also with no success.