Steve Fossett Declared Dead 221
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."
Wife wanted his will put into effect? (Score:5, Interesting)
Faked death (Score:2, Interesting)
If he was a gangster rapper you'd see people coming up with faked death theories with weird patterns in numbers related to his disappearance to give us all hope...
Unfortunately he was no gangster rapper, only a simple average white billionaire..
The man died with open eyes doing what he loved (Score:5, Interesting)
Big wilderness out there (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [webshots.com]
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.
Inappropriate tagging" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Inappropriate tagging" (Score:2, Interesting)
It's very sad, but you can always hope that maybe they will grow up a bit in time.
Welcome to a new low (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Inappropriate tagging" (Score:5, Interesting)
And I'm not so sure that they're as young as you think: I'm pretty certain that some of them have had plenty of time to grow up but didn't.
Re:Faked death (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Jim Gray (Score:2, Interesting)
Why is Fossett's wife in a rush to declare that her husband is dead?
Strange occurances (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sad... (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Sociopaths (Score:1, Interesting)
Humbled by our inability to find him (Score:3, Interesting)