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Comments: 356 +- News: Fossett's Plane Found on Thursday October 02 2008, @01:54PM
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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."
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He's still kicking! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:He's still kicking! (Score:4, Insightful)
No body was found, and was purportedly "eaten by animals". Conspiracy theories live on!
Kudos to hiker that turned in what he found. I suspect many people would not have turned in the thousand dollars or so in cash had they made the discovery.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe he found several thousand, and decided to turn in enough to be realistic.
Re:He's still kicking! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not saying I think (or care) one way or another but it is conceivable he used a parachute...I mean...this is Steve Fossett after all.
So, maybe Fosset and DB Cooper are not kicking back a few drinks with Elvis on some lush pacific island paradise?
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Re:He's still kicking! (Score:5, Funny)
I think it's pretty obvious what happened here: Fossett was teleported out of his plane by the crew of a Starship from the future that used the "slingshot around the Sun" technique to travel back through time in order to retrieve him. They then took him back to their time in order to speak with an alien race that was accidentally destroying the Earth in its attempt to communicate with any daredevil billionaires that might be on the planet. Unfortunately for them, the Earth no longer used money, so there were no billionaires available, hence the need to fetch Fossett.
The evidence points so clearly to this scenario that there must be some sort of vast conspiracy covering it up, perhaps to avoid the embarrassment that would result from revealing that two of the Starship's crew members were able to infiltrate a nuclear wessel undetected.
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Re:He's still kicking! (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:He's still kicking! (Score:5, Informative)
I've flown a Citabria. It's designed for aerobatics (the name is "airbatic" spelled backwards, even) and, at least in the plane I flew, the "seat" is actually a sling that holds your parachute. There was no way to sit in the thing unless you were wearing one.
Of course, it may be possible to buy a version of the airplane with normal seats--epecially if you're a billionaire, as Fossett was--but I never saw one myself.
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Re:He's still kicking! (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know myself. Well lets get back to discussing the story about a rich pilot that died in a small aeroplane crash..
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Re:He's still kicking! (Score:4, Insightful)
Pilots of small planes don't need parachutes -- unless they're flying aerobatics (in which case they're required). The Citabria is a plane designed for aerobatics, although if Fossett wasn't planning on doing any he wouldn't have needed to take a 'chute.
(One of the things that makes a plane designed for aerobatics is that there are ways to make it easy to get out. I don't know about the Cit but for example on the Cessna Aerobat, you just pull the hinge pins (designed to be easy to pull) and the door comes off.)
And in a mountainous or heavily treed area, there's no such thing as "a decent crash landing", the plane is going to break up.
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Re:He's still kicking! (Score:4, Informative)
General aviation pilots wear chutes all the time when they do spin training. Spin training is only required for instructors, but many pilots get it anyway. Chutes are required and are most certainly used for it.
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Re:He's still kicking! (Score:4, Informative)
They discontinued teaching spin recovery in primary training in about 1995 because NTSB research indicated more people were being killed in crashes resulting from spin recovery training, than being killed in spins. A gruesome but pragmatic decision.
You're free to go get training in spin recovery yourself, and most instructors recommend it. I believe that qualifies as aerobatic instruction and parachutes are required, but I'm not sure.
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Re:He's still kicking! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Fuel / Engine Related? (Score:5, Funny)
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Or weather, or health related (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Or weather, or health related (Score:4, Informative)
Other sources are providing more information. According to CBC [www.cbc.ca], the plane slammed into a mountain.
Anderson said no remains were found in or near the aircraft, but said the crash was so severe that "I doubt someone would have walked away from it."
The plane appears to have crashed head-on with the mountainside before disintegrating, he said. The aircraft's engine was found about 90 metres from where the fuselage and wings were found.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
GTA: Inyo (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:GTA: Inyo (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Or weather, or health related (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes being a sail plane pilot is good experience if your engine quits. But have you ever flown a Citaboria? I have. Here is how you land one: The plane has no "flaps" so don't worry about those. While at pattern altitude (about 1,000 feet above ground) when you are on down wind abeam of the numbers. Put the engine to down to idle. Make two left turns and the plane will land right on the number. basically you loose that 1,000 feet "way fast" the Citaboria glides like a rock. You really have to keep the nose down or you run out of airspeed. By comparison any two seat trainer flys like a sailplane
If the engine quits that plane is going to land within only a couple miles at best. That said there was a road within walking distance of the crash site. Any reasonable pilot still in control of the aircraft would have at least attempted to aim for a clear area. I don't think he was in control when it hit the ground.
My gues is the caue was either a mechanical, non engine failure of the structure or control system or a medical problem.
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I think the cliff he hit was the problem (Score:5, Informative)
At that high an altitude, if you get clouds/ fog, you can run into a mountain at 10,000 feet, even if you're a good pilot ( who forgot to check his map).
NTSB said that the wreckage looked like high velocity impact, with little chance of survival.
Re:I think the cliff he hit was the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly... An engine failure in something as slow as a Citabria would be easy to to "pancake" as they call it. Chances are he never saw the mountain which is very easy to happen..
Fossett was an experienced pilot. He wouldn't have been flying in IMC (instrument meteorological conditions) in the vicinity of a mountain below the minimum sector altitude, at least not intentionally.
Given that he was in a different area than he was expected, I suspect Steve had some sort of medical problem that incapacitated him. If the airplane was trimmed properly, it could have flown for a while before impacting the mountain at cruise speed.
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Too early for amature guesses. (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Too early for amature guesses. (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know what it is but the end result looks like controlled flight into the ground.
Yeah, I don't get the "statistically, dollars to donuts it was engine/fuel-related", because statistically, CFIT is a much more common cause of air accidents than engine or fuel problems. Fuel problems are actually one of the *least* likely causes, be it contamination, starvation or exhaustion.
There were reportedly clouds at around the altitude he'd have been flying at that day obscuring mountain peaks like this one. I think the most likely cause at this point is he was flying in a cloud and ran into the mountain. It happens, even to airliner pilots with sophisticated ground proximity warning systems. General aviation pilots usually have either no such equipment, or rudimentary ground avoidance equipment. I'm not sure what, if anything, his plane would have been equipped with, but even if it had such equipment, it wouldn't necessarily have been enough to prevent a CFIT accident.
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Dollars to Donuts I say... (Score:5, Funny)
Now it's up to the NTSB to tell us why this happened, although, statistically, dollars to donuts it was engine/fuel-related.
Dollars to donuts the CRASH was gravity related...the engine/fuel is just a side problem!
Re:Dollars to Donuts I say... (Score:5, Funny)
Exactly. Gravity is just an unproven theory. Intelligent Falling [theonion.com] is clearly to blame.
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Wrong about Fossett, wrong about Reiser... (Score:5, Funny)
What are the random internet nutcases right about anymore?
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The world ain't what it used to be.
Wacky conspiracy theory (Score:3, Funny)
It took them this long to find the plane because they had to fake up a wreck!
Head on collision (Score:5, Informative)
They're saying that the damage looks like he flew straight into the side of the mountain and that it was extremely unlikely that it was a survivable impact.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/10/02/steve.fossett.search/index.html [cnn.com]
My experience that day (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:My experience that day (Score:5, Informative)
Barstow is 256 miles [google.com] from Mammoth Lakes. Granted, that's by car, but it's a fairly straight-shot route.
That's like saying a thunderstorm in New York City killed someone in Washington DC
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Weather History (Score:5, Informative)
Mammoth Lakes, CA
Week of Sept 2, 2007
No precipitation.
http://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KMMH/2007/9/3/WeeklyHistory.html [wunderground.com]
See the radar loop from that date by using the link in the Radar Archive box near the bottom-right of this page:
http://www.wunderground.com/radar/radblast.asp?ID=HNX®ion=c1&lat=37.65124893&lon=-118.98217010&label=Mammoth%20Lakes%2C%20CA [wunderground.com]
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Re:My experience that day (Score:4, Funny)
Haikus are easy
but sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator
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The area (Score:5, Informative)
As mentioned in another post, as best as I can tell from the news articles, this [gass.ca] is a Google Earth view of the area he went down. The Minaret Lake area is where the hiker found his ID and money, and the Minaret Peak is near where his plane hit.
It's called "Controlled flight into terrain" (Score:3, Informative)
It's an all-too-common occurrence in aviation. It even occurs to big, commercial flights. For example, Eastern Airlines flight 401 [wikipedia.org] (in 1972).
By all accounts his plane was equipped with an ELT and a radio. Presumably he would have used one or both if an engine failure or other mechanical problem occurred and he had some time while gliding.
So, how close were we? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [gearthblog.com] however has a kml file of the crash location [gearthblog.com] 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
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From TFA... (Score:4, Funny)
I hope this guy doesn't own a gun... get it?
Citabria, huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember that about 25 years ago in Alaska we had a number of cases where the Citabria would crash because a wing came off. (And the Citabria was supposed to be aerobatic-certified aircraft. It just wasn't rugged enough for bush flying.) As I understand it, an AD was issued that should have corrected all the defects, but just knowing the problem existed is enough to dismiss early conclusions as to the reason behind the crash.
1 foot = 3.04 metres? (Score:5, Funny)
Mammoth Lakes is about 10,000 feet, or 30,400 meters, above sea level, and snow makes already difficult terrain largely impassable and could bury plane wreckage.
Re:Check your own logic before calling others craz (Score:5, Insightful)
that someone else found the crash site and (for reasons unexplained) took his ID and a grand in cash from it, then hid them where the hiker later found them
My guess would be that "someone" would have been something like a raccoon or a buzzard.
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Re:Check your own logic before calling others craz (Score:5, Funny)
My guess would be that "someone" would have been something like a raccoon or a buzzard.
That certainly explains why when I'm killing rats and spiders they keep dropping gold and broadswords.
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Re:Check your own logic before calling others craz (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Occam's razor... (Score:5, Funny)
I think it is becoming clearer that Fossett survived the crash, and was shortly adopted by a bear, and is currently living in a cave, having forgotten his human status due to traumatic brain injury.
*sigh* More of this? You he's-alive-and-adopted-by-bears people are crazy nutjobs. It's the he's-alive-and-adopted-by-wolves people who have their fingers on the pulse of truth. Wake up!
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Re:What's with the wife? (Score:4, Insightful)
.
They had been married forty years.
She surely knew how his life was likely to end:
In college at Stanford University, Fossett was already known as an adventurer; his Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brothers convinced him to swim to Alcatraz and raise a banner that read "Beat Cal" on the wall of the prison, closed two years previously. He made the swim, but was thwarted by a security guard when he arrived. Steve Fossett [wikipedia.org]
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Is it just me or does the wife seem really really indifferent. Here is the possbility her husband's remains have been found, and she's "monitoring the situation"?
Sounds to me like she told a newsie vulture to go away and leave her alone.
(I'm reminded of the school shooting in Oregon, where the news media descended like a cloud of buzzards and the students told 'em to go to hell - going so far as to moon them from a school bus.)
Re:That's really a shame. (Score:4, Informative)
Chevy Chase and the estate of Generalissimo Francisco Franco hold joint rights to that meme [wikipedia.org].
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Re:That's really a shame. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:That's really a shame. (Score:5, Informative)
He pushed the envelope in sailing and flying, setting more than 100 records. He was also active with the Boy Scouts at the national level, even heading up the National Eagle Scout Association. He set the bar very high, and inspired thousands, maybe millions. His money was incidental, though it helped him to set those records. It's just the kind of person he was. That's why so many people care about it.
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Remains were found in the wreckage. (Score:5, Informative)
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