Slashdot Mirror
Steve Fossett Declared Dead
Parallax Blue writes "Millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, who risked his life seeking to set records in high-tech balloons, gliders and jets, was declared dead Friday, 5 months after he vanished while flying in an ordinary small plane. The self-made business tycoon, who in 2002 became the first person to circle the world solo in a balloon, was last seen Sept. 3 after taking off in a single-engine plane from an airstrip near Yerington, Nev., heading toward Bishop, Calif. He was 63."
From the sounds of it, Steve's wife wanted his last will and testament read and put into effect, and that's what prompted the ruling in the first place. CNN reported that "Judge Jeffrey Malak made the ruling after an emotional presentation from Fossett's wife of 38 years, Peggy, who also asked that her husband's will be entered into probate."
I came, I saw, She conquered.
This is no tragedy; we should be celebrating this man's life. We should all be as lucky to live such a full life, and die as old men under such circumstances. When most reach old age, they give up on life entirely. When your body begins to fail, it takes real courage to tempt fate on a regular basis.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
When he returns from China seven years later, after his ninja training, so he could fight crime in the streets as a billionaire super-hero.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It amazes me, especially living in the area of endless urbania that is the Greater L.A. area, that there are still uninhabited areas so vast that a plane could crash and not be found after exhaustive searching with high-tech equipment.
Then again, there is an almost-intact crashed plane near the western (Highway 190) entrance to Death Valley, near Towne Pass, that's in plain view of the highway yet almost impossible to see unless you know what you are looking for. It crashed in the 50s; it was part of a CIA mission and lost power over the Amargosa Valley. The crew bailed out near Furnace Creek, if my memory serves me correctly, then the plane crashed in the Panamint Range to the west.
Some pics from someone who hiked to the site: http://rides.webshots.com/album/292358776FDMVRo
After seeing that on one of my outings, Fossett's plight isn't so incredible to me. Sucks to be him, but he certainly didn't live a hard knocks life prior to his demise.
How do we shut off tags?
Right under this story I see a tag of "whogivesafuck."
That's just not acceptable.
Whoever tagged this article "whogivesafuck" should turn in their human card at the door. Sure, you may not have known this guy personally, but that tag is in really poor taste. How would you like it if after someone you knew died, someone came up to you and said "he's dead. so what?".
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
...people say "he died doing what he loved". No pilot loves crashing a plane. Whatever had gone terribly wrong at the end of Steve's last flight, I can guarantee you he was not loving it. I'd bet that the first emotion that he felt was anger at whatever caused the initial deviation from normal flight, followed by shock and apprehension in the final seconds once he realized he was in serious trouble.
Fortunately I have never been in such a dire predicament while behind the controls of a plane, the worst that's happened to me was a partial loss of power after takeoff during climbout in a C172, but I had plenty of altitude and an airport right behind me in easy gliding distance in case the engine quit completely, but I landed normally without incident. I can tell you I was certainly NOT loving it, and the emotion going thru my head was that I was pissed off at the airplane.
Two pilot friends of mine have died in small plane crashes, both due to making really stupid errors in judgement. As they drilled their respective planes into the dirt, they were not doing what they loved either. Both of them took friends and family members to their deaths with them too.
This tag marks a new low on slashdot.
Maybe the tagger is just jealous, because this man did the right thing with all his money. Instead of attending stupid show-off parties, he used his money to make his dreams become reality.
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
The other day I was reading about the littany of Mr. Fossett's achievements. In an age where records are set and fall with each of our ephemeral 15 minutes of fame, Mr. Fossett managed to do something truly extraordinary: become a legend. The moment Fossett vanished, I was in the air in my Cherokee not 100nm from his departure field. It was a mundane day of flying, if any day spent rattling around two miles in the air in an over-sized beer-can pulled by a 1920's tractor motor over the least hospitable terrain in the lower-48 can be called 'mundane'. The Nevada desert has an amazing way of making a man seem both profoundly alone and free, regardless of the technology within he wraps himself. That day of flying will forever be seared into my mind. In a world of mundane, Steve Fossett successfully made the transition from mere mortal to legend. His records and legacy stand so tall that the stories of his achievements will inspire my children's children alongside the stories Earhart and Lindberg. And yes, while a mourn the loss of the man (and I do keep a guilty hope that he's just chilling down in the Bahama's somewhere, enjoying his retirement), It was the legendary ending to the story of legendary achievement: something to celebrate and honor, not mourn and regret. Thank you Steve Fossett. Rest In Peace, you've earned it.
We had a good friend of the family go missing and presumed dead when he was in his late 50's. He was wealthy (not stinking rich, but had owned a car dealership and good investments for 30 years). The circumstances caused our family to think that he had staged things, including insider info (such as a rented car... unusual... and certain affairs nicely wrapped up, including insurance).
Why, one wonders, would he do such a thing when he was at the top of his career and independently wealthy? Easy.
Damn those pesky terrorists
This is all part of the plan to have Steve show up on ABC's LOST as one of the survivors in the background.
too soon, too soon
Can I bum a sig?
Why is Fossett's wife in a rush to declare that her husband is dead?
Because it's probably pretty hard to run an estate of a billionaire without the guy being dead. Even billionaires have bills to pay.
AccountKiller
Why is Fossett's wife in a rush to declare that her husband is dead?
5 months is hardly 'in a rush' - remember with Fosset there are billions on the line and political and legal positioning to grab a slice of it will just pile up more and more the longer she waits. She's doing what needs to be done to protect the estate, as callous as that sounds but it needs to be done. One assumes someone who lives dangerously and has so much money like Fosset has left a will but greedy relatives and business partners can chew it all up in legal bills rather than whatever it was Fosset wanted done with his assets after he was gone.
It would take very roughly 1,750,000,000,000 light single-engine airplanes to cover the dry-land area of this planet -- or 15,500,000,000 for Nevada. Yes, it's a very big place. Aerial searches that find nothing are not in the least uncommon. An FAA district office I visited in Denver some years back had a wall map showing the last known positions of over thirty aircraft just in Colorado. Even Ohio, the most uniformly populated state, has one or two. Like to try an expensive science-fair project? Make a full-size cardboard effigy of a crashed airplane, have someone place it in a random spot in an area of, say, 20 x 20 miles, then charter an airplane and look for it.
It's spooky, really, but I have to think that there'll be a Slashdot story in a few years about how his bones and his plane were found using new Google Maps Streetview - Desert Edition.
There is an organized project trying to do that, right now.
rj