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What's he wearing red and white stripes? Seriously though, this is a pretty cool tool even if it is a bit ridiculous considering all the missing persons there are out there who get no attention...

but I found Waldo!

I suppose there are already trained people looking at the images. From the Police, Fire-Department, or whatever organization handles these kinds of emergencies in Nevada. I stress the word trained because the satellite data definetely needs experienced eyes to look out for the right stuff.

The article starts by explaining what to look for on these images. This is good, but to substitute for experience in looking at such images.

Cool, can i get some of my neighborhood? The stuff on google is a good 5 years old, if not older. The resolution is pretty poor too.

The area of Nevada where he is missing is actually rugged and mountainous ( I have some proerties in those parts myself ). Look on Google earth if you don't believe me, the name 'Nevada' means ',mountains. Also area 51 is now where nearby. There's a lot of rugged and inaccessible terrain he could've gone down, unfortunatley, and 5 days is a long time without water, its dry and hot out this time of year. I'd say the situation doesn't look good at this point, but we can always hope for a miracle, best of luck to the SAR and CAP people.

38 29' 03.51" N
119 24' 21.64" W

Most of us aren't SAR experts, and wouldn't know a burn mark from a ridge shadow. The SARs that will be sifting through the public's mostly incorrect identification of accident artifacts would be better utilized in direct search efforts (either in the air or using imagery), rather than being distracted by what could best be considered a somewhat morbid game of "Where's Steve".

The time to test this type of technology out isn't during a live SAR mission. Leave the search and rescue to the experts, and please don't tie up their time with your well-meaning, but ultimately time-wasting, suppositions.

These pictures are lousy - to really get useable images would require a fly-over.
Manned flyovers are expensive, slow, and often dangerous if a person is lost due to inclimate weather;
However Unmanned flyovers can be conducted in poor weather, at very low cost, and without pilot fatigue or airspace crowding concerns.

It is ironic that private pilots have been objecting to uav, and now their hero doesn't have the benefit of private UAV flights for search and rescue in his time of need.

Not to gloat, but this would be a fitting time for the private pilots associations to change course on elbowing out UAV's and giving another nascent industry to europe.

AIK

This is a very good use of the technology. I hope this works if for no other reason than to bring closure to his family if he hasn't survived.

My problem is the way they've got the web page set up. Every time I submit a new "HIT", I have to scroll all the way down the page again to see the next image. It's great that they have a "primer" a the top, but I've done a couple hundred now... I don't need to keep seeing that over and over again. Just cut to the chase and show me the next picture to examine.

Also, looking at the Google Earth swath that this is covering, I can't help but think that he might be outside of that. Can anyone comment? Or do they know "if he's anywhere, he's in that area."?

-S

I was about to post how distorted the image is, when on a hunch I decided to unclick the "terrain" box on GE. The image becomes a LOT clearer, but I still don't think it is nearly clear enough to identify something as small as a 22" plane.

I keep hearing people whine about the Mechanical Turk interface. Each image only requires one mouse click and two keyboard presses (no mouse movement at all required). Here's how:

1 - When you manually accept the first hit, make sure you check "Automatically accept the next HIT".
2 - Press the END key to scroll all the way down to see the image.
3 - Click the mouse on Yes or No.
4 - Press the ENTER key to accept the HIT.
5 - Goto 2

I've found two images that are really good candidates for a crash. One was at 38.020248,-119.368515. It looks like a line of tree damage, with a bright object at the edge of the tree line.

Next, I keep hearing people saying that laypeople aren't useful for something like this. This is simply to flag interesting images so experts can spend their time looking only at the most likely candidates. Also, this is free for them. So they could use an algorithm something like this:
Show each image to at least 5 people.
Each time someone says "Yes" to a specific image, show it to two additional people, up to a max of 20 reviews.
Sort the images by descending Yes vote count and show them to the experts in that order.

Dan East

The last time an effort like this was undertaken, it was for Jim Gray (Database researcher, Microsoft Fellow), who had disappeared sailing from San Francisco. I checked on that for a while, but never saw any more information.

Was anything ever found in the search for Jim Gray? No remnants of his boat, or other signs of what happened?

...as Steve Fossett originally set out to take this journey to find a flat and long enough place to do his world land-speed record. Now Google has high-resolution imagery of the whole place, which makes the whole undertaking a bit obsolete in retrospect ?

38 3'24.02"N 11914'56.55"W It looks like a plane, it's about 20 ft in length and has a 23-24 ft wingspan. I don't know how to contact them but if anyone here can communicate with them, please do. Don't forget to credit me if it turns out to be his plane.

I've seen on the news that they've checked out like 6 or 7 plane crash sites that turned out not to be Fossett. What that left me wondering was, are those sites where they just left wreckage because it was remote or are they previously unknown crashes where a plane went missing and was never found?

How often does that happen with light aircraft? Do they vanish entirely very often?

When I started to help this morning there were 32,000 work units (called hits, images to be reviewed) available. They were disappearing at a rate of 5-10,000 per hour, meaning that all things being equal there were 50-100 people looking at them.

However over the past half hour the work units available have been *increasing*. Currently 12,000 and increasing. Clearly they are adding more to be done faster than we're doing them. So anyone who helped out at the beginning - don't assume the hits are "all done". There could be more at any time.

In my old version of IE I couldn't see the scale bars or the example image, looking at the same coords of a unique scene in google maps I estimated the image was 125m x 125m - which would be half meter resolution. Now I see they claim the images are actually 85x85m, which would be 1.08ft resolution.

Based on that and that I've done 400 units, that mean's I've searched one full square mile.

It also means the 32,000 units I saw when I started is only 10 miles x 10 miles, 100 square miles. I heard someone else say that they only have 500 square miles of imagery. Looking at Google Earth, assuming the new imagery is the kinda-rectangular patch that is all the same color/brightness - they have approx 1700 square miles. That means there is approximately 600,000 work units in total that need done. If everone does a square mile (shouldn't take more than an hour) then we need 1700 people helping.

But as someone else noted - they're really artificially limiting the search area, considering the range on his plane. Assuming he went certain places or crashed on his way back to the ranch. That doesn't bode well.

PS: It'd be way way more effective if they showed a "image before crash" so that people could self-discover their false positives, without forcing people to download google earth and figure it's before/after out, and/or be smart enough to copy/paste the coords into google-maps satellite view.

PPS: If they were really smart, they'd have a second private pool of the public's false positives being reviewed by amateurs or employees whom they know have much much smaller false positive rates, whom they know are comparing the two available before images (google maps and google earth) against the current images.

BTW: Here are images of the actual specific plane he was flying. http://www.airport-data.com/aircraft/N240R.html [airport-data.com] (Aviation buffs take pictures and index online everything that flies, apparently :) I'm guessing that although from the side it's mostly blue, that the top of the wings are white.