Another missing Blimp!!!! Keep a look out around Burnley.

Burnley FC blimp appears on eBay in suspected hoax

By Samrana Hussain

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AN INVESTIGATION has been launched into an eBay advert which claims to be selling the missing Burnley Football club blimp.

Police have asked eBay to remove the advert selling the airship-style balloon after offensive comments were left on the web page.

But they believe the eBay advert, which shows a picture of an airship style balloon in front of Turf Moor and a bid of £800,100, to be a hoax.

championship match against QPR, is not genuine.

Burnley Football Club said they had not received any confirmed sightings of the blimp since vandals cut it free last week.

The reward of four VIP match day corporate tickets for a forthcoming game, still stands for the safe return of the balloon, which can be clearly identified by the club crest and branding.

Experts said the 20-foot, helium-filled balloon known as a blimp, used for the first time before last Tuesday's match against QPR, may have travelled as far as Scotland.

The blimp, which was only bought for a four-figure sum a few weeks ago to promote match days, was last seen heading eastwards.

But the Met Office said that south-easterly winds would have propelled the balloon in a north-westerly direction.

The club alerted air traffic control over the incident and the matter has been reported to the police.

Footage from CCTV cameras, which sweep the car park where the balloon was tethered, did not capture the incident.

A spokesperson for the club said: "We have not yet received any confirmed sightings of the blimp, but the reward still stands and we would love to hear from any genuine sightings on 01282 704701."

A police spokesperson said: "There is an investigation into the incident.

"The advert does look like it has been doctored.

"We have notified eBay and asked them to remove it because of the offensive comments on there."

Steve Fossett to be declared legally dead.

Very sad, and I guess it had to happen one day.

Peggy Fossett must have been holding out on this one.

Perhaps Sir Richard Branson should pick up the gauntlet and have a crack at the land speed record in memory of his friend and fellow adventurer.

I'm sure many people have seen the video clip where Sir Richard talks to a chap at a balloon launch about Steve Fossetts flight, only to discover that he is talking to Steve Fossett himself.

One of modern times great adventurers, maybe Steve has left us in a mysterious manner befitting of such a chap.

Gary Mortimer

From http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-fossettnov27,1,2075668.story

By Michael Higgins Tribune staff reporter
1:53 AM CST, November 27, 2007
Article tools


The wife of Chicago adventurer Steve Fossett went to court Monday to have him found legally dead, saying she believes he died when his plane disappeared over the Nevada desert in September.Peggy Fossett asked a Cook County probate judge to begin the process of distributing his assets according to his will."[Steve] Fossett's wealth is vast, surpassing eight figures in liquid assets, various entities and real estate," the court petition said.

Fossett was reported missing Sept. 3 after he failed to return for a lunch appointment from what was supposed to be a pleasure trip while a guest at the ranch of Barron Hilton, the hotel magnate. Fossett had only one bottle of water with him.Officials and volunteers searched for weeks for Fossett and the white, blue and orange Bellanca Citabria Super Decathalon plane he was flying. Searchers used rescue aircraft, satellite and radar images and even scoured the craggy, remote terrain of western Nevada on foot. The search recovered wreckage from eight other air crashes, including one from the 1960s, but it turned up no sign of Fossett or the plane."As anyone can imagine, this is a difficult day for our family," Fossett's wife, who lived in the Gold Coast neighborhood with her husband, said Monday in a written statement. "We will continue to grieve and heal, but after nearly three months we feel now that we must accept that Steve did not survive."Peggy Fossett said she and others contributed more than $1.2 million in private funds to the search effort, which was scaled back in mid-September and suspended in early October."Although an ongoing recovery mission continues, all involved have accepted the inevitable conclusion that Mr. Fossett did not survive," Mary Downie, one of Peggy Fossett's lawyers, said.Under the law, the petition can be filed at any time after someone is suspected of dying.It could take two to three years to distribute Fossett's assets. Peggy Fossett's lawyers are expected to appear before Probate Judge Jeffrey Malak in a few months.Steve Fossett, a commodities trader who had made millions of dollars in Chicago, was known as a record-setting adventurer whose conquests included scaling the world's tallest mountains, swimming the English Channel and completing five nonstop flights around the earth as a solo balloonist, sailor and pilot.The National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the plane flown by Fossett was destroyed in a fatal crash, according to Monday's court petition."Even if Fossett had survived a crash uninjured, which statistics show to be very unlikely, without water Fossett could not live more than a few days," Mark Marshall, a Fossett friend, said in a sworn statement.In her affidavit, Peggy Fossett said her husband was in good spirits and had no debt or financial difficulties."None of Steve's wealth was transferred out or withdrawn in any manner that would suggest a planned disappearance," her statement said. "Steve has not accessed any of his assets since his disappearance. Steve had no debt and no life insurance."According to the petition, Fossett was in the late stages of building a vehicle that he hoped could set a land speed record.mjhiggins@tribune.com

Steve Fosset, was the Amazon Mechanical Turk effort worth it??

From wired magazine http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/11/fossett_search

Looking back, Diana Francis says she should have known it would be a big waste of time. She sat for hours each day in her husband's home office in Houston scouring little digital snapshots of the Nevada desert on Amazon.com, in hopes that she'd help locate vanished millionaire aviator Steve Fossett.
Finally, though, she decided the exercise was tedious and unproductive.
"It was so exciting and new when we started it and it seemed like it could really help them, but eventually it was disheartening, and I realized I had no idea what I was actually looking for," says Francis, who participated for a couple of weeks while her kids were at school. "You know the saying, 'a needle in a haystack'? Well, this literally was like looking for a needle in a haystack the size of a small European country."
She's not the only one now expressing doubts about Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a high-tech aspect of the Fossett search that received such vast media hype that Mechanical Turk's director, Peter Cohen, won't do interviews about it any more. The online retail giant took the most up-to-date satellite images of the 17,000-square-mile search area, broke it into smaller chunks, and had more than 50,000 volunteers look at randomly distributed segments. In Mechanical Turk parlance, each segment was a small job, known as a Human Intelligence Task or HIT, which required the assigned volunteer to flag anything thought to be out of the ordinary.
Fosset disappeared Sept. 3 during what was planned as a brief jaunt from a ranch 90 miles southeast of Reno, Nevada. The massive online effort didn't lead to the discovery of Fossett or the single-engine Citabria Super Decathalon he was flying. But neither did the dozens of planes and hundreds of ground searchers who made up the biggest search for a missing aircraft in U.S. history. To date, it remains a mystery what happened to Fossett.
Amazon closed the search last week, almost a month after the official on-site search ceased. Now that it's over, Amazon spokeswoman Kay Kinton says the company has learned much, and she gives the system high marks for its ability to update and adapt as the situation changed.
Still, many of those who participated have mixed feelings about their experiences. Francis, who says she's "not that much of a geek," regrets taking part, but many who are more knowledgeable about the technology say it was a worthwhile exercise that should help Amazon refine its methods in the future.
"There was always the hope that people with good eyes would hit the right image, but it's also a learning experience," says Ken Barbalace of Portland, Maine, who runs the website EnvironmentalChemistry.com and who looked at 25,000 HITs. "We can't figure out how to make it a valuable tool until you work on it and change things."
The most important change Amazon needs to make for the future, Barbalace says, is that the interface ought to offer a way for searchers to toggle between the image they're given and an image of the same section prior to the date of the search target's disappearance. That would have helped volunteers know whether the things they were spotting were new.
Instead, some volunteers took the GPS coordinates from the squares they were issued and fed them into Google Earth for older images, slowing down their progress. And in the last couple of weeks when Mechanical Turk started using higher-resolution images, the GPS coordinates were no longer listed with the images, which made matching the photos even more of a challenge.
Some volunteers believed that information was withheld because Amazon began to worry that helpers would try to actually go to the sites themselves to search. But Kinton says it's because the source at that point changed from satellite imagery to images taken from aircraft, which didn't have GPS coordinates attached.
Another intense Turker, Andy Chantrill of Castle Donington, England, says he wishes Amazon had provided the searchers with more information about the overall effort. The 25-year-old software designer says he put in 85 hours poring over 20,000 HITs. Since each square was reviewed by up to 10 people, he says he'd like to know how many others had flagged ones he looked at.
"The value of the contribution is hard to quantify because ultimately we failed to find Steve, but it seems reasonable to imagine that this could work," Chantrill says. "I don't see any downsides to it, so long as people don't pester the professional search-and-rescue teams with poor leads."
Yet that is exactly what happened, much to the exasperation of Civil Air Patrol Maj. Cynthia Ryan, who says her e-mail and voicemail boxes were flooded with leads from folks working on the Mechanical Turk. Many times, they mistook search aircraft in the air for Fossett's plane -- even though it's unlikely Fossett's plane would have appeared intact.
"The crowdsourcing thing added a level of complexity that we didn't need, because 99.9999 percent of the people who were doing it didn't have the faintest idea what they're looking for," Ryan says.
"In the early days, it sounded like a good idea," Ryan continues. "In hindsight, I wish it hadn't been there, because it didn't produce a darn thing that was productive except for being a giant black hole for energy, time and resources. There may come a day when this technology is capable of doing what it says it can deliver, but boy, that's not now."

Steve Fossett

New York Times
October 4, 2007 By Steve Friess
LAS VEGAS, Oct. 3 — The Air Force destroyed all records from unsuccessful searches for aircraft missing before 1989, which is likely to make it much harder for Nevada investigators to determine the victims of three wrecks found in the recent search for the aviator Steve Fossett.
The planes were found in the Sierra Nevada region in the four-week search for Mr. Fossett, which was officially suspended on Tuesday without locating him or the single-engine plane in which he vanished on Sept. 3.
During the hunt through 20,000 square miles of rugged terrain in northern Nevada, searchers spotted three crashed planes that had never been noticed. Now that the Fossett search is over, the Civil Air Patrol and the Nevada Division of Emergency Management plan to return to those sites to investigate.
One resource that had been expected to help in the inquiry was “suspended mission files,” kept at Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Fla. Those files are the paper trails of all failed searches for missing aircraft by the Civil Air Patrol, a volunteer Air Force auxiliary group, or any other Air Force resources.
But in 1994, the Air Force instituted a regulation requiring the destruction of records of noncombat missions after seven years. At that time, officials say, personnel at Tyndall destroyed suspended mission file records up to 1989.
Michael Strickler, a spokesman for the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center, said, “In theory, we’re not supposed to have any records from anything past October 2000. Why we didn’t do that? I guess we just didn’t get around to it.”
Mr. Strickler said he did not know the reason for the regulation, which did not require Congressional approval. Calls to the Air Force division responsible for such regulations were not returned.
It is believed that the wreckages discovered in the Fossett search date back further than 1989, said a spokeswoman for the Civil Air Patrol Nevada Wing, Maj. Cynthia S. Ryan.
Major Ryan said she was stunned that the files were destroyed. The hope had been that, even if Mr. Fossett was not found, an exhaustive search would at least resolve other mysteries.
“That’s a little disheartening,” Major Ryan said. “They can transfer this stuff to microfilm. So what’s the problem? They’re keeping better track of your tax records.”
William C. Ogle of Gainesville, Fla., was among those disappointed about the destruction of the records. Mr. Ogle’s father, Charles Ogle, disappeared in 1964 after flying out of Oakland, Calif., for Reno in a single-engine plane.
“It sounds sort of dumb,” said Mr. Ogle, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida. “I don’t understand why they’d even do that. It sounds like some colonel or something probably got upset that there was too many files taking up too much space and said get rid of them.”
It is unlikely that the files were that voluminous. Of hundreds of search missions in the last decade, 18 ended without locating the target aircraft, according to Brig. Gen. Amy S. Courter, the air patrol’s acting national commander.
A spokesman for the Nevada Division of Emergency Management, Gary Derks, said he was less bothered by the destruction of the files because he was not convinced that they would resolve questions about the newly found wrecks.
At one point in the search for Mr. Fossett, officials thought that they had found as many as eight new wrecks. But Mr. Derks said some were spotted more than once, and others had been logged by the National Transportation Safety Board.
Initial surveying of the remaining three wrecks did not find human remains, Mr. Derks said.
“I suspect that in these cases the aircraft was located, the pilot was removed, and aircraft was left there,” Mr. Derks said. “Animals don’t eat shoes and pants. There would be something there to say a person was there.”
The Fossett search files will probably not be destroyed even if he is not found, because an Air Force regulation requires that cases “which have wide media coverage” or missions “having historical research interest” be sent to the National Archives after five years.
Mr. Fossett, 63, set more than 110 aviation records, including becoming the first person to complete a solo uninterrupted flight around the world in a hot-air balloon, and making the longest nonstop flight in aviation history.
He vanished while taking what was to be a short morning jaunt around the region surrounding a ranch 90 miles southeast of Reno owned by William Barron Hilton, the hotel magnate.
Mr. Fossett has yet to be declared presumed dead.
The Fossett and Hilton families continue to send out private search planes. Patrick H. Arbor, a close friend of Mr. Fossett and the former chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade, said, “It looks pretty hopeless,” but pointed to the extraordinary survival skills of Mr. Fossett, who is president of the National Eagle Scouts Association.
“If anyone on this earth could be out there crawling around surviving,” Mr. Arbor said, “it would be Steve.”

Has Technology abandoned Steve Fossett

By Tom Gardner

ASSOCIATED PRESS

MINDEN, Nev. – Steve Fossett and technology were longtime companions, working together in record flights around the world in advanced airplanes and balloons.

But the globe-circling adventurer's comrade appears to have turned fickle during and after a three-hour Labor Day jaunt. The aircraft borrowed from hotel magnate Barron Hilton, with whom he was staying in Smith Valley, carried an emergency locator transponder, or ELT, and the noted aviator often wore a special wristwatch that allowed him to signal his location in an emergency. But rescuers have heard nothing from either.

“Technology is a two-edged sword,” Civil Air Patrol Maj. Cynthia Ryan said. “I've heard a lot of people mentioning the fancy Breitling watch that he is probably wearing. That's great. His ELT is probably working just fine. But when you've got terrain like we have here, line-of-sight issues, bouncing off of canyon walls and not getting out, then you seriously diminish the ability of technology to do what it was designed to do.” Fossett's wife, Peggy, said she did not believe her husband was wearing the watch.

In addition, Ryan said the on-board emergency locator transmitter, or ELT, could have been disabled in a crash or if the plane ended up submerged. Or its battery might have been too low.

“It's not foolproof,” she said.

Nor, it seems, is the latest gadgetry for detecting heat or objects from the air.

In addition to scores of eyes in Civil Air Patrol planes that combed a vast swath of western Nevada for two weeks, listening in vain for the transmitter's ping, other aircraft used old-fashioned infrared and a sophisticated system new to search and rescue.

On Monday, two weeks after Fossett was last seen, the Nevada Wing of the Civil Air Patrol sent home all but two of its planes, which remain at the airport in Minden. On Wednesday, the Nevada National Guard's helicopters returned to their bases. The choppers and the two Civil Air Patrol planes remain on standby to respond to any new leads.

Searchers had held out high hopes for the technological newcomer ARCHER, which can “see” objects that don't belong in places like Nevada's other-world landscape – such as a piece of airplane.

“This is the kind of terrain that Archer was born and raised in and they want to put it through its paces and see just what it can do. These are optimal circumstances to test that system,” Ryan said during the search.

It was developed in the 1990s for scientific observation and military applications and refined for search and rescue by the military and Civil Air Patrol Col. Drew Alexa, Ryan said.

While the human eye typically detects three light bands, ARCHER – an acronym for Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Reconnaissance – can analyze 50. Mounted on the belly of a Civil Air Patrol plane, it transmits images to a monitor for instant analysis and captures the images for later use on the ground.

More traditional is infrared scanning, used on Nevada National Guard planes and helicopters to seek out a human being, even in the summertime furnace that is the Nevada desert.

“You look for different things in the daytime than in the nighttime. In the daytime you're looking for cooler whereas in the nighttime you're looking for hotter,” according to Col. Craig Wroblewski, director of operations for the Nevada Army and Air National Guard.

“In the daytime when the rocks are all sitting at 150 degrees, a human is going to show up cooler where at night the rocks cool down to 30-40 degrees, they're going to show a much darker signature than a human would.”

The Forward Looking Infrared, or FLIR on the Guard's C-130 airplane and its two UH-58 helicopters also has acute daytime eyesight.

“I've been in the helicopters down there in Las Vegas with their Forward Looking Infrared system and flying down the Strip. I've been able to zero in on somebody's license plate,” said Bill Burks, assistant adjutant general for the Nevada Air National Guard.

While the C-130 and the UH-58s initially flew daytime and nighttime sorties in the search for Fossett, they eventually were restricted to the daylight hours because of concerns about the number of planes flying in the area.

“Normally when we do a search and rescue with the helicopter, we're looking at a smaller area like in the Sierra or in Lyon County or some of our surrounding cow counties so we know right where our helicopters are searching,” Wroblewski said.

“We have a hard time at night when all the other aircraft are flying to make sure our pilots are safe. ... We think it's more safe to conduct the search during the daytime.”

In addition to the trained members of the Civil Air Patrol and the military, technology from Google and Amazon.com gave couch potatoes a chance to join the search.

Using a technique similar to the one that lets people find an aerial view of their house, amateur volunteers pored over high-resolution images of the rugged Nevada landscape where Fossett was thought to missing in an area twice the size of New Jersey.

The satellite images were taken within days of Fossett's disappearance, according to the Nevada National Guard, which used analysts to decipher possible sightings e-mailed by the public.

The images produced a lot of tips but no sign of the blue and white fabric-covered plane.

“Thousands of people have been sending in information,” Nevada Air National Guard Tech Sgt. Steven Snyder said. “When the Europeans get off work we get a bunch of e-mails. When the East Coasters get off work we get a bunch of e-mails.”

The Civil Air Patrol's Maj. Ryan said she doubted the technology available through Google or Amazon.com could match that of the government's satellite imagery.

And she said the discoveries of six planes that have been missing in Nevada for decades gives her hope that technological advances over the decades will help find Fossett's plane.

Still, Undersheriff Joe Sanford of Lyon County, where the airstrip Fossett used is located, is baffled that the adventurer's plane remains missing.

“We've got 2007 technology. ... that can count beer cans in the back of pickup. But we haven't found an airplane. That's what's frustrating,” Sanford said.

New Scientist extract, Steve Fossett

Internet volunteers transform search and rescue

• 26 September 2007
• Paul Marks
• Magazine issue 2623

FROM my viewpoint above the Nevada wilderness I'm scouring the landscape for signs of a missing aircraft. I'm searching for Steve Fossett, the millionaire, record-breaking aviator whose plane went missing on the Labor Day holiday.

If it were any other search I'd be in the cockpit of a search plane, but this time it's different. I'm sitting in front of my PC, 8000 kilometres away in London, sifting through satellite photos that I, like thousands of others, downloaded to take part in an internet-based search for the missing aviator.

As New Scientist went to press, Fossett's single-engine plane was still missing, and the Nevada Civil Air Patrol had scaled down the search. But the photos scoured by online volunteers helped to reveal eight other, older aircraft wrecks that surfaced and would otherwise have been lost in the 44,000-square-kilometre area, highlighting the potential of online "crowd-sourced" search. My experience ...

One last hope to find Steve Fossett

• New leads from Air Force experts have prompted Nevada authorities to restart the search this weekend for missing adventurer Steve Fossett in four counties near the Death Valley.
• The Nevada National Guard will not take part in the search.
• On the web, virtual searchers have been checking out satellite images for weeks.

New York. Did Steve Fossett’s (Photo Phil Romans) plane crash near the Death Valley on September 3? Sheriffs and volunteers will scan the ground in four Nevada counties this weekend to try to find the missing adventurer. New leads have prompted authorities to restart the search for Fossett. “Air Force experts analyzed data from military and civilian radars, said Chuck Allen, State Trooper with the Nevada Department of Public Safety. They made deductions and narrowed the search to an area of about 100 square miles”.

In Chicago, people at the stevefossett.com headquarters had no such information leading them to think that the missing businessman might be close to the Death Valley. “According to my people on the ground, these reports are false, said Brian Spaeth, a spokesman for the Fossett challenge. We will not take part in the operation this weekend”.

The search remains limited. The Nevada National Guard has stopped its own search-and-rescue mission on September 18 and will not fly again over the area highlighted by the U.S. Air Force experts. The hope to find Fossett alive is almost non-existent. “There is only so much a man on his own can do in the desert, said captain April Conway, spokeswoman for the Nevada National Guard. If he was alive, he would have signaled”.

Despite their inability to find any trace of the missing aviator, Fossett’s family and friends are not giving up their private search. On Tuesday September 25, a plane with sophisticated camera gear flew again over the desert. Thousands of Internet users have joined the online search for Fossett. Early in the rescue effort, billionaire Richard Branson, a friend of the missing aviator, got the help of Google Earth and Amazon.

Google quickly requested from its providers new satellite images of the zone, where Mr Fossett’s plane went missing. Google passed those images along to Amazon.com. And Amazon’s powerful tool divided an area of 10,000 square miles into smaller zones and assigned them to people, who signed up to help find the adventurer.

Captain Conway said the National Guard got emails all over the world and followed some leads. “At one one point, our folks were directly in contact with the people at Google Earth but the search was unsuccessful”.

In Chicago, Brain Spaeth said that 20 people keep exploring any inch of the satellite images to try to find a trace of the adventurer. “A lot of people responded to our calls for support, he said. But nothing came out of this. We did not find Steve”. The web search has limits too. “ The area where Mr Fossett went missing, is very hilly with deep valleys, Captain Conway concluded. There are canyons. If the plane crashed in one of them, it will not be visible from above”.

Jean-Cosme Delaloye
A French version of that story came out on September 27 in Tribune de Genève and 24heures in Switzerland.

Steve Fossett, new images at Amazon Mechanical Turk

If you have already taken part in Amazon Mechanical Turk search for Steve you may be interested to know that newer high definition images have been added.

More info at Steves official site http://www.stevefossett.com/

G

Help find Steve Fossett 2

Seems like it is for real and a very good idea, each user is presented with one image to review. All using something called amazon mechanical turk, no doubt something a stack of balloonists are about to learn about.

More upto date images for google earth http://s3.amazonaws.com/fossett/geoeye-color.kml

Happy hunting, would be amazing if this overtook the work of several aircraft and high tech equipment.

Spread the word amongst your ballooning friends.

G

Help find Steve Fosset

I guess this is worth a try if the images truely are recent. Click through the links to start looking!!

An anonymous reader invites us to join in the hunt for the missing Steve Fossett using Amazon's Mechanical Turk. DigitalGlobe, one of Google's imaging partners, has acquired new high-resolution satellite imagery of the area where Fossett disappeared on Monday. The public can now go through this imagery and quickly flag any images that might contain Fossett's plane. Flagged images will receive further review by search and rescue experts.

Risk-takers such as aviator Steve Fossett intrigue psychologists who study them

The Associated Press

Published: September 8, 2007

NEW YORK Steve Fossett's wealth made his epic adventures possible, but his relentless willingness to take risks is shared by other on-the-edge thrill-seekers whose exploits and setbacks have long fascinated psychologists as well as the public at large.

What prompts climbers to return to the mountains after losing toes to frostbite and partners to fatal falls? What prompts daredevil Alain Robert, the self-proclaimed "Spiderman," to scale scores of the world's tallest structures with bare hands and no safety net?

"When you get to the very bottom of people who take risks, it's the thrill of it," said Temple University psychologist Frank Farley. "It can be a physical thrill, it can be a mental thrill, or it can be both."

While the search for Fossett and his missing plane continues, friends and colleagues have described him as a careful planner who meticulously prepared his adventures — whether by balloon, glider or sailboat — to minimize danger. Some have insisted "daredevil" is a misnomer for him, even as he was hatching plans to break the world's land speed record.

But Michael Dunn, whose friendship with Fossett dates back to an early 1980s climbing expedition in Antarctica, described him as "the quintessential adventurer" and said risk was always part of the equation.

"You fully understand that there's a possibility that you might not come out of this," said Dunn, who was at the Minden, Nevada, airport where the search for Fossett was being run.

"Is the risk worth the reward? In my opinion it isn't even a question," he said. "You have to be willing to risk the possibility of failure."

Farley is a past president of the American Psychological Association who has extensively studied risk-taking. He says it is an aspect of human nature with both positive and negative sides. For example, he said a significant amount of crime is motivated by thrill-seeking impulses.

"But Steve Fossett was on the constructive side," Farley said. "He embodies an incredibly important spirit in humanity."

"Often the people who are not the thrill seekers look at that behavior and say, 'They're crazy,'" Farley added. "In fact, it's the impulse that created the modern world — it's the force of inventiveness, creativity, individuality, change and survival."

Farley says researchers who categorize people as Type A or Type B personalities should add a third category — Type T — for thrill-seekers.

Many psychologists have linked contemporary risk-taking to patterns of social change. Those who perceive today's world as too predictable and safe may be tempted to seek an outlet in the form of extreme sports such as parachuting off cliffs or snowmobiling on avalanche-prone mountainsides.

Others take risks in a quest to set records — to be the youngest, oldest or first of a certain category to accomplish a particular feat, such as circumnavigating the globe alone.

"In our modern world, we've eliminated a lot of risks and threats that our ancestors faced," said Daniel Kruger, a research scientist at the University of Michigan's School of Public Health. "People might seek these thrills because their current environment is so safe it's not giving them the same stimulation."

For some of these risk-takers, there can be an almost addictive reaction, Kruger said. "Because they're continually seeking the thrill that they felt before, they need to do more and more to recapture that same sensation."

Both Kruger and Farley suggested that risk-taking, in its positive form, can correlate with business and financial success.

For Fossett, who funded his adventures with a fortune amassed as a commodities broker, success was a matter of personal achievement, not of publicity and fame, according to Dunn.

"He's a very low-key, understated person who does the things that he likes to do for the passion of it," Dunn said.

Recalling a talk with Fossett about adventuring, Dunn summarized his friend's attitude: "If you do these kinds of things and you do them well, it's the same sort of philosophy you need to succeed in business or to succeed in life or to succeed in marriage or to succeed in anything, because you have the tenacity and you have the focus and you have the direction to do that."

___

Associated Press writer Brendan Riley in Minden, Nevada, contributed to this report.

Hunt for adventurer Steve Fossett enters sixth day

15 hours ago

LOS ANGELES (AFP) — The search for missing adventurer Steve Fossett entered a sixth day on Saturday with searchers still no closer to unraveling the mystery of the millionaire aviator's fate.

A first wave of aircraft took off from Minden Air Base in northwestern Nevada around 8:00 am (1500 GMT).

Later Saturday a total of 45 planes and helicopters, including around a dozen of volunteer pilots in private aircraft, were patrolling the region, rescue officials said.

"Anything reasonable that we can add is probably going to make a difference, but we won't know that until we find our target," Civil Air Patrol Major Cynthia Ryan told reporters on Saturday.

Fossett, the 63-year-old veteran of numerous world record-breaking plane and balloon flights, has not been heard from since Monday, when he failed to return after taking off from a private airstrip 80 miles (130 km) southeast of Reno, Nevada on a solo flight.

Fossett's failure to file a flight plan has left rescuers scouring a vast 10,000 square mile (25,900 kilometer) expanse of rugged mountain and desert wilderness with no firm idea of where the aviator's plane may be.

"We've said it's like looking for a needle in a haystack and that's exactly what it's like," said Nevada State Police spokesman Chuck Allen.

Underscoring the vastness of the area being searched, officials said spotter planes have so far found wreckage from six previously unrecorded crash sites.

Meanwhile, Ryan praised the contribution of volunteer pilots involved in the search. "They did some of their own work based on what Mr Fossett's habits were. They've done an amazing job in the area that they have searched."

Lyon County under sheriff Joe Sanford told reporters on Friday that members of Fossett's family were struggling to maintain their optimism.

"Everyone here is hopeful, but I've got to tell you that they're having a tough time with this," Sanford said.

Fossett has survived numerous near-misses and harrowing crash landings over the years, including a 29,000-foot (9,000-meter) plummet into the Coral Sea off Australia because of a storm-shredded balloon.

Rescuers do not believe Fossett had packed food and water aboard his plane because he had only planned a three-hour flight.

Fossett's single-engine Bellanca aircraft was equipped with an electronic tracking device designed to be triggered in the event of a rough landing, but it has not been activated.

Fossett made the first solo nonstop, non-refueled circumnavigation of the world in 67 hours in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. In 2002, he was the first person to fly solo around the world in a balloon.

Fossett survival skills crucial as hunt enters fifth day

LOS ANGELES (AFP) — Rescuers were Friday clinging to the hope that Steve Fossett's legendary survival skills would enable the aviator to hold out until he is found as the daunting search for the missing adventurer entered its fifth day. The 63-year-old veteran of several world record-breaking solo plane and balloon flights has not been heard from since taking off from a private airstrip 80 miles (130 km) southeast of Reno, Nevada, early Monday. On Thursday officials expanded the area of remote, mountain terrain being searched to 10,000 square miles (25,900 square kilometers), and have said the search for the airman is like "looking for a needle in a haystack." But despite the difficult nature of the manhunt, which has forced spotter planes to make multiple, painstaking passes over a landscape populated by sharp mountain peaks and jagged, twisting canyons, rescuers remain optimistic Fossett may yet be found alive. "He's a survivalist," said Nevada State Police spokesman Chuck Allen. "The hopeful scenario is that his plane went down -- either he put it down, or something caused it to go down -- and he survived and is not too badly injured. "The weather has been co-operating -- it's not been too cold at night, not too hot in the daytime. If he's not too immobilized for any reason we're confident he can survive in the elements outside." Fossett has survived numerous near-misses and harrowing crash landings over the years, including a 29,000-foot (9,000-meter) plummet into the Coral Sea off Australia because of a storm-shredded balloon. Allen said rescuers did not believe Fossett had packed food and water on board his plane because he had only been planning a three-hour flight. However there were several natural water sources in the area being searched, he said. "There are a number of mountain lakes when you get up into the Sierras, dozens of lakes, streams and creeks," he said. On Thursday, Nevada Civil Air Patrol spokeswoman Major Cynthia Ryan warned it could be weeks before Fossett is found. "Searches of this nature -- typically, they can go on for as long as two weeks and longer," Ryan said. "We are still scratching the surface." Asked if rescuers believed Fossett could still be found alive, Ryan cited a case where a pilot was found after a hunt lasting several days. "I think it was three days into the search, they finally found the target and the pilot was still hanging upside down in his harness, and a tree, quite alive," Ryan said. Fossett's single-engine Bellanca aircraft was equipped with an electronic tracking device designed to be triggered in the event of a rough landing, but it has not been activated. Fossett made the first solo nonstop, non-refueled circumnavigation of the world in 67 hours in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. In 2002, he was the first person to fly solo around the world in a balloon.

Friends Call Missing Aviator Resourceful

By STEVE FRIESS
Published: September 7, 2007

MINDEN, Nev., Sept. 6 — A few years back, after six friends climbed Granite Peak in Montana, five of them pulled off their helmets to pose for a summit photo. The one who did not, Steve Fossett, told his friends that it was unsafe to remove the helmet, even after the climb was over.

Patrick Arbor, one of Mr. Fossett’s companions on that and many other outdoors adventures, stared at that photo, on his desk in his Chicago office, on Thursday as he wondered where the renowned adventurer might be.

Mr. Fossett, 63, who holds more than 110 aviation, boating and land-speed records, vanished Monday after taking off in a single-engine aerobatic plane for a recreational jaunt in northern Nevada. He was expected back a few hours later at the Flying M Ranch, an aviation resort owned by the hotel magnate William Barron Hilton, but never returned.

“He’s absolutely not a reckless person, he’s a very cautious, methodical person,” said Mr. Arbor, a former Chicago Board of Trade chairman who has known Mr. Fossett for more than 30 years. “I have traveled all over the world with him. I kind of joke that traveling with him is like traveling with a wandering drugstore because he travels with all kinds of antibiotics and such. He takes risks, but not reckless risks.”

Although the aircraft he flew, a blue-and-white Citabria Super Decathlon, is an aerobatic plane, friends said Mr. Fossett did not enjoy doing airplane tricks and was most likely scouting dry lake beds in the high desert region where he might try to break the land-speed record in a race car sometime in 2008.

An exhaustive air and land search for Mr. Fossett continued Thursday involving more than a dozen aircraft and more than 200 volunteers.

Gary Derks, a spokesman for the Nevada Emergency Management Division, said such searches can go on for weeks, recalling one three years ago that took more than a month before rescue crews gave up. Neither the crash victims nor their wreckage were ever found, he said.

Mr. Arbor said that he spoke Wednesday to Mr. Fossett’s wife, Peggy, who is helping direct the search from the Flying M Ranch. Mrs. Fossett, who “seemed composed until the end of our conversation,” was displeased with the search on Tuesday when high winds cut short some parts of the mission, but “felt on Wednesday it was going much better,” Mr. Arbor said. The Fossetts, married more than 39 years, have no children.

In addition to planes with infrared detection capable of searching at night and boats prowling nearby Walker Lake with sonar, a plane from the Utah Wing of the Civil Air Patrol arrived Wednesday with equipment capable of collecting hyperspectral and panchromatic images far more detailed than plain sight or ordinary photography can gather.

Rick Cronk, a friend of Mr. Fossett’s and president of the Boy Scouts of America, said it was discouraging that there had been no contact despite word that Mr. Fossett had a watch with global positioning capabilities and a plane with an electronic beacon. Mr. Fossett, chairman of the National Eagle Scouts Association, is “among the most resourceful people I know,” he said.

“He knows what to do,” Mr. Cronk said. “You don’t move. You stay put so people can find you. You draw attention to yourself by setting a fire or drawing straight lines in the desert, doing something man-made. You have to be creative.”

Fossett case puzzles local glider pilot

The Marlborough Express | Thursday, 6 September 2007


Marlborough glider pilot Ray Lynskey says the most puzzling thing about the disappearance of multimillionaire American adventurer Steve Fossett in the Nevada desert is that he hasn't phoned a plane.

Mr Lynskey and a group of New Zealand glider pilots got to know Mr Fossett during the past five years when they have all gathered in the Nevada desert to fly.

The Waihopai Valley resident said this morning that he and other glider pilots think it's strange that Mr Fossett has been unable to call out on the channels used by airlines.

"It's something most of us have done when we've got into trouble and are out of cellphone range.

"It's surprising he hasn't been able to do that."

Mr Fossett has been missing since Tuesday and searchers are focusing on a 1554-sq-km area south of the airstrip used by Fossett about 128 km southeast of Reno, Nevada. The 63-year-old was reported missing after failing to return from a flight inspecting dry desert lake beds.

He is famous for flying solo around the world by balloon and plane and has set 115 world records in balloons, planes, sailboats, gliders and airships.

Mr Lynskey has not flown in a glider with the American adventurer but is part of a group of New Zealanders including Christchurch glider pilot Terry Delore who know Mr Fossett well.

Mr Delore has flown double seater planes with Mr Fossett and is credited with saving his life in 2004 when Mr Fosset became unconscious and had to be taken down to a lower altitude to recover.

Mr Lynskey said Mr Fossett was a "good guy" who was quite reserved but seemed to enjoy the company of Kiwis.

"The Americans may concentrate on the money thing but we couldn't give a stuff. He's a good guy who's flown a wide variety of aircraft. He's not a pretender.

"He's swum the English channel and taken part in the Leadville 100, which is a 100 mile run in Aspen Colorado. That's a bit of a slog (at altitude).

"I would say he's fairly reserved for a start. But he drinks beer the same as we do."

Mr Lynskey said any comment on what had happened to Mr Fossett would be pure speculation at this state.

"But maybe he's just waiting for someone to pick him up.

"It's a hell of a long walk to get anywhere near where he is."

Rescuers widen hunt for Fossett

From

Mr Fossett has not been heard from since Monday evening
Teams hunting for missing US adventurer Steve Fossett have widened their search to cover 10,000 sq miles (25,900 sq km) of desert in Nevada and California.

US Civil Air Patrol spokeswoman Major Cynthia Ryan has warned that finding Mr Fossett could take weeks not days.

"Four days into it, we are still scratching the surface," she said.

Rescuers are using thermal imaging so they can scour the remote mountain terrain where Mr Fossett's plane went missing on Monday both day and night.

See a map of the area

There has been no word from Mr Fossett since the 63-year-old was seen taking off from a private airfield near Yerington, Nevada, about 80 miles (130km) south-east of Reno.

"As you can imagine, trying to make that needle stand out in a haystack that big is going to be a real challenge," Maj Ryan said.

"It's going to be frustrating for a lot of people who were hoping for results early on," she added, saying that typically searches of this nature "can go on for as long as two weeks and longer".


It's extremely worrying that it's lasted three days


Emergency workers are also using sonar to search for possible wreckage in Walker Lake, an 18 mile-long body of water south-east of the ranch where Mr Fossett took off from.

Nevada state police spokesman Chuck Allen was keen to emphasise that the authorities had not received any information indicating that Mr Fossett had crashed into the lake.

However, he said that a boat with sonar equipment that can detect large and fixed objects beneath the surface of the water was being used "if only to rule it out".

Treacherous winds

Mr Fossett's family reported him missing after he failed to return from a trip which should have lasted just a few hours.

Adam Mayberry, a local pilot and former spokesman for the Reno-Tahoe International Airport, suggested Mr Fossett's single-engine Citabria may have been hit by treacherous winds.

"There's been times when I've been flying in the wind and my blood turns cold," Mr Mayberry said.

British billionaire Sir Richard Branson, who has partnered Mr Fossett on earlier record-breaking attempts, said the lack of news was worrying.

"He's the number one gliding pilot in the world, as well as the number one aviator in the world... If anybody could have glided [this plane] down, it would have been him," he said.

"But obviously, it's extremely worrying that it's lasted three days.

"If the worst comes to the worst... Steve's lived his life to the full, and he hasn't wasted a minute of his life," he added.

Mr Fossett did not file a flight plan with the aviation authorities before taking off because he was not required to do so.

The only clue to his whereabouts is that he was intending to fly south.

It is also understood Mr Fossett had some communication equipment with him, including a special emergency watch which he could have used to signal his position.

Record-breaker

Mr Fossett made his fortune in the American financial services industry.

But he is best known for the impressive number of world records he has broken as a pilot, balloonist and sailor.

He has set 116 records in five different sports, more than 60 of which remain unbroken.

Last year Mr Fossett broke the world record for flying further than anyone else in history.

In March 2005, he became the first person to fly a plane solo around the world without refuelling.

And in 2002 he was the first person to fly a balloon around the world solo.

Steve Fosset Google Earth, Wired

As the search for missing adventurer Steve Fossett continues in the torturous desert ravines of Nevada, Reuters reports that his friend Richard Branson has contacted Google to see if the latest Google Earth satellite images contain clues to his whereabouts.

I'm embarrassed to admit that, until yesterday, I knew little else about Steve Fossett than his name. But the flood of articles and concern that have accompanied his disappearance testify to his prominence in the American mind -- and looking at his life, it's not hard to see why. Fossett is a manifestation of the American dream: he struck it rich and then used his wealth to support adventures that recall the devil-may-care gallantry of a century ago, when technological advances sent pilots at then-superhuman speeds across oceans and skies and horizons that still seemed vast and mysterious.

When Fossett's plane went down, he was scouting possible sites for the pursuit of a world land-speed record. The locale and the quest recall another mogul-turned-adventurer, Howard Hughes, and the outpouring of support echoes some of the sentiments described in The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe's account of the Mercury astronauts: an ancient, transcendent adulation for the warrior who goes into single combat as a representative of his people, and in the modern age is a daredevil or explorer rather than a fighter.

In a sense it seems strange to emphasize Fosset's plight in a world full of suffering, but in another sense it's a profoundly human impulse, for he's at once a person and a symbol of our eternal quest to push the envelope of speed and time. Good luck, Steve.

Fossett May Have Faced Tricky Winds

By TOM GARDNER

MINDEN, Nev. (AP) — Millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett vanished somewhere across a landscape of soaring peaks and sagebrush desert notorious for winds so powerful and tricky they can swirl an airplane like a leaf and even shear off a wing.

As the search for Fossett dragged into a second day Wednesday with some false leads but no sign of the 63-year-old aviator or his plane, some veteran pilots speculated he may have fallen victim to the treacherous and sometimes deadly Sierra Nevada winds that squeeze through the narrow canyons.

"There's been times when I've been flying in the wind and my blood turns cold," said Adam Mayberry, a private pilot and former spokesman for the Reno-Tahoe International Airport.

Fossett, who over the years risked his life circling the globe in a hot-air balloon and an experimental lightweight aircraft, disappeared after taking off from a private airstrip Monday in an ordinary single-engine plane to scout sites for an attempt at a land-speed record in a rocket-propelled car.

Crews from three states searched by air and land over an area the size of Connecticut, marked by rugged mountains jutting to 10,000 feet.

The Nevada National Guard planned to fly throughout Wednesday night and into the early morning hours of Thursday, using C-130s and helicopters with infrared and thermal imaging equipment. The Civil Air Patrol and additional flight crews were scheduled to resume the full search shortly after daybreak Thursday.

Fossett's plane, a Bellanca Citabria Super Decathlon, had a locator device that sends a satellite signal after a rough landing, but no such signal had been received.

Fossett always wears a Breitling Emergency wristwatch that allows pilots to turn a knob and immediately signal their location, said Granger Whitelaw, a fellow pilot and a co-founder of the Rocket Racing League. But no such signal was activated.

Authorities said at one point they thought they had spotted Fossett's plane and sent in a helicopter crew to confirm.

"We thought we had it nailed," Nevada Civil Air Patrol Maj. Cynthia Ryan told reporters late Wednesday. "Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of many dozen unmapped wreck sites from previous years."

Wind gusts in the area can whip up without warning from any direction, with sudden downdrafts that can drag a plane clear to the ground. Passengers flying even on commercial airliners between Las Vegas and Reno know to keep their seat belts fastened for a ride that is never smooth.

Mark Twain wrote about the "Washoe Zephyr" — named for the Nevada county — in the book "Roughing It."

"But, seriously, a Washoe wind is by no means a trifling matter. It blows flimsy houses down, lifts shingle roofs occasionally, rolls up tin ones like sheet music, now and then blows a stagecoach over and spills the passengers," he wrote.

In 1999, three well-known glider pilots were killed in two separate accidents after taking off from the Minden airport.

Donald D. Engen, director of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, died along with the former president of a gliding organization after their sailplane broke apart and fell 4,000 feet. And nationally ranked glider pilot Clem Bowman died when his glider plummeted 100 feet shortly after takeoff.

Nevertheless, Ryan said she doubts any sudden wind burst would have caught Fossett by surprise on Monday. The weather report indicates the winds were calm, and it was "just a really delightful day to go flying."

Moreover, "he knows mountain flying, which is an art in and of itself," Ryan said.

And while Fossett is a record-seeker, those who know him said he would not take unnecessary risks.

"He's not that kind of pilot. He's not a cropduster. He never was," said Rick Blakemore, a veteran pilot and former Nevada state senator.

Authorities said the airplane carried food, water and other survival gear, and estimated Fossett could survive at least a week.

"He's the No. 1 gliding pilot in the world, as well as the No. 1 aviator in the world. If anybody could have glided down, it would have been him," Sir Richard Branson, the British billionaire who has helped finance many of Fossett's adventures, said in London. "But obviously, it's extremely worrying that it's lasted three days."

Associated Press writers Brendan Riley in Carson City, Nev., Scott Sonner in Reno, Nev., Betsy Taylor in St. Louis, Mo., and Romina Spina in London contributed to this report.

High-tech plane used in hunt for adventurer Fossett

LOS ANGELES (AFP) — An aircraft with state-of-the-art imaging technology joined the search for aviator Steve Fossett on Wednesday, two days after a plane flown by the adventurer vanished over a rugged region of Nevada.

A squadron of planes and helicopters resumed operations over a 600-square-mile (155,000-hectare) region of mountain terrain after failing to find any trace of Fossett during searches late Monday and Tuesday.

Fossett -- who has survived numerous brushes with death during a series of record-breaking solo flights around the world by balloon and airplane -- has not been heard from since taking off from a private airstrip early Monday.

Officials have described the task of locating 63-year-old Fossett's possible whereabouts as "like searching for a needle in a haystack."

Rescue planes were boosted by clear skies and calm flying conditions on Wednesday after being buffeted by turbulence during searches earlier this week.

Major Cynthia Ryan of the Civil Air Patrol revealed that high-tech hyperspectral imaging equipment known as ARCHER, which is capable of distinguishing between objects on the ground, had also been deployed.

"ARCHER is essentially something used by the geosciences," Ryan said. "It's pretty sophisticated stuff ... beyond what the human eye can generally see."

Later Wednesday Ryan revealed that rescuers had believed they had found Ryan's plane after spotting wreckage, only to be disappointed when it turned out that the debris was from an old crash site.

"We thought we had it nailed," Ryan said. "Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of many dozen unmapped wreck sites from previous years.

"We sent the helicopters there and they verified it was not Mr Fossett nor his aircraft."

Fossett was reported missing on Monday after he failed to return from a solo flight in a single-engine Bellanca plane following take-off from an airfield owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton.

His aircraft was equipped with an electronic tracking device designed to be activated in the event of a crash but it had not been deployed.

Fossett made the first solo nonstop, non-refueled circumnavigation of the world in 67 hours in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. In 2002, he was the first person to fly solo around the world in a balloon.

British tycoon Richard Branson, who partnered Fossett on earlier attempts to circle the globe in a balloon, said he had contacted Internet search giants Google to help with the search.

"I'm talking with friends at Google about seeing whether we can look at satellite images over the last four days to see whether they can see which direction he might have been flying and whether they can see any disturbances anywhere that they can pin from space," Branson told Canadian media.

The British billionaire said although he was concerned at Fossett's failure to activate an emergency tracking beacon, he remained positive.

"(Steve's) not only the greatest aviator in the world, he's also the greatest gliding pilot in the world," Branson said.

"I'm very confident that he would have got the plane down in one piece as long as the terrain below him was desert and not mountainous hills or woods or rocks.

"Having said that, obviously we're worried (about) the fact that there's been no emergency beacon go off. He could be injured, which means the emergency services have just got to get to him as soon as possible."

A multi-millionaire who made his fortune dealing stocks in Chicago, Fossett has spent the past two decades chasing world records and shattering them, sailing, floating and flying faster and farther than anyone before.

In 2006, he touched his aircraft down at an airfield on Britain's south coast, setting the record for the longest solo, non-stop, non-refueled flight in terms of distance.

Fossett has also set dozens of world records in sailboats, gliders and hot-air balloons.

"If you look at the history of adventurers, it is so often the simple things (that cause trouble)," Branson noted.

"Lawrence of Arabia went through everything and was then killed in a motorbike accident when he'd given up all his dangerous pursuits in Arabia. Anyway, I still feel confident that Steve will come back."

False alarm in Fossett search

Rescuers are still combing rugged country for signs of the light plane of Mr Fossett. (Reuters: Rick Fowler )

Concerns are growing for millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett who has been missing in the United States since early on Tuesday.

Rescuers in Nevada are still combing 1,500 square kilometres of rugged country for signs of his light plane.

Hopes were raised when searchers spotted a plane wreck earlier today, but Major Cynthia Ryan from Nevada's Civil Air Patrol says it was not the aircraft of Mr Fossett.

"We thought we had it nailed. Unfortunately it turned out to be one of many dozens unmapped wreck sites from previous years," she said.

"We found that out by sending in a helicopter and they put a man on the ground and verified that it was not the target that we were looking for, it was not Mr Fossett or his aircraft."