Fossett's Plane Found

otter42 writes "Sadly, it looks as if all those crazies claiming Steve Fossett was still alive were wrong after all. The NY Times has the confirmation that wreckage of Fossett's Bellanca Citabria was found. Now it's up to the NTSB to tell us why this happened, although, statistically, dollars to donuts it was engine/fuel-related."

Comments

Too early for amature guesses.

[LWATCDR]

I don't know what it is but the end result looks like controlled flight into the ground.
Fossett was a very good pilot. An engine failure at altitude would have given him enough time to send out a distress call unless he was very close the ground when it happened. So maybe but it could have been any number of things. From the report of the crash it sounds like it hit hard and fast.
For the family this is probably a relief since now they can have some closure hopefully.

My experience that day

[mbone]

The day Steve Fossett was lost I was driving from San Francisco
to Las Vegas by way of Barstow. Just after Barstow we entered one of those huge desert storm systems, a line of thunderheads
stretching North and South, and all of a sudden it rained so hard
and the wind blew so hard that it was hard controlling the car,
even when we slowed to 20 MPH. Soon after we left the storm, I
heard about the disappearance of Steve Fossett on the radio.

I have been convinced ever since that moment that that storm
killed him. I cannot see how a light aircraft could have flown
through it, and yet it came up pretty suddenly. Looking at the
map, I might still be right.

So, how close were we?

[Just Some Guy]

I, like many of us, participated in that mechanical turk thing a few days after the crash to try to find his airplane in satellite photos. Did we cover that area? I kind of hope not.

Re:So, how close were we?

[Megaport]

A summary of various comments above: it was outside the turk's search area, and google earth still doesn't have recent photos of the crash site even now.

The google earth blog however has a kml file of the crash location based on the no-fly zone coordinates and some additional guesswork,

I looked at it and couldn't see any wreckage, certainly nothing we could have seen during the search.

-M

Re:He's still kicking!

[Martin Blank]

Most airplane accidents are single-aircraft incidents, and most of the problems occur on take-off or landing, well below altitudes where a parachute can be effectively used. The number of lives saved would be negligible. Even if pilots were mandated to know how to use a parachute, most of them would probably stay in the plane to save the passengers, who would be even less likely to know how to use a parachute.