Fossett's Plane Found 356
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."
That's really a shame. (Score:1, Insightful)
My condolences to the family.
What's with the wife? (Score:1, 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"? The hell? Its not a weather system! Then again, I can't begin to imagine what she went through, so maybe this is an attempt on her part to keep her hopes from getting too high. I dunno, but really, does anyone else get this vibe?
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.
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.
Facts for the Conspiracy Theorists (Score:2, Insightful)
As someone that's hiked that area long ago, when they mentioned the search would begin on the John Muir Trail between Dorothy and Shadow Lakes. That is a *heck* of a lot of VERY rugged forest area above 8000ft. It's not like there's a long snow-free time up there, or a whole lot of people at any given time either.
That they were able to find the wreckage is awesome. That's one great reason why we pay taxes people.
Prior searches focused on land east of the Glass Mountains. Another *huge* area.
As an FYI, the area has all kinds of omnivores. I can't see how a pilot could survive that either. There's no place to land a plane! Let's say he does the TV-movie thing and tried some kind of bail out. Bailing out, much less walking out without intimate knowledge of the area are both very low probability events in that region.
You guys should get out more, especially the conspiracy nuts. It's a beautiful area of our country. If that's too far away, visit a nearby National Park.
Re:Or weather, or health related (Score:2, Insightful)
If you are worth his kind of money, I think carrying $1,000 is a non-issue. He was, after all, staying at one of the Hilton's places, and depending on where he was going perhaps he preferred to pay for fuel in cash? I dunno, I used to carry $200 with me all the time and that was when I was earning $22K a year. If I was loaded I sure would carry $1k just on the occasion I needed it (10 x $100 bills is nothing, same in my pocket as $5 and 5 $1s)
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]
Re:He's still kicking! (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe he found several thousand, and decided to turn in enough to be realistic.
Re:What's with the wife? (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:He's still kicking! (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
"If it's not yours, don't take it." Why do some people find basic ethics so hard? :(
Not to mention the questions that would come up when the wife says, "I wonder what happened to the $1000 he always kept in his pocket, just in case he needed some cash." (Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn't, but that's a big chance to take.)
I suppose you could take the cash and then not report the find at all, thus preventing anyone from even asking you that question, but gods -- the poor widow and all his friends and stuff -- you need to be more than just a bit greedy to do something like that. I think at that point you go beyond the average person's casual evil into the realm of real monsters. I don't know that there's really a lot of people who would go that far. I like to think not. Maybe I'm naive...
Re:That's really a shame. (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:I think the cliff he hit was the problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Dollars to donuts it was engine/fuel. (Score:1, Insightful)
IANAL
However I am a pilot and as such, I will take your bet.
A man who has flown solo around the world is less likely to mess up on fuel than the pilots who bump fuel exhaustion up as a statistic (we call them doctors). The man was a pilot not a doctor who is going to go die in his Bonanza (the V tailed doctor killer most likely).
I still consider that he may have intentionally killed himself in his plane. This was my guess at the time as to what happened.
There is the possibility that if he hit IFR he decided not to trust his instruments. Again this kills less experienced pilots a lot more often (ala Kennedy). So this is also not likely.
He could have had a medical issue and been dead/incapacitated before he hit the mountain. Old guy, yeah, I can see this one.
Engine failure during normal use is not that common. Also if you are well trained neither this nor a fuel emergency stands that great a chance of killing you (depending on where you are). In the case of this happening to a well seasoned pilot the 1st place that they will decide to land is NOT THE SIDE OF A MOUNTAIN!
Weather? Maybe but unlikely. Unless he had no experience as a mountain pilot (doubtful). This is still possible as mountains can be unfriendly.
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.
Re:Weather History (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking at the Nexrad there, and also from Edwards AFB, "My" storm clearly did not extend that far, and there doesn't seem to be much bad weather around Mammoth Lakes that day (although 1 hour time steps is pretty coarse for thunderstorms).
Thanks for that. I had always wondered about this, and now it seems clear that the storm I was in was not involved in the Fossett crash.
Re:That's really a shame. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too early for amature guesses. (Score:3, Insightful)
You have never flown have you? Actually this kind of accident is very common with a good pilot. This wasn't a tricky flight. He planned VFR and probably did minimal planning. Why? Because this was a milk run flight. A drive around the block. If you make the mistake of flying VFR into IFR condition in an aircraft that can not support IFR then you are in a world of hurt.
The wost thing any pilot can say is, "I can make it". When I was younger I flew sailplanes. I was never even what I would consider to be a good pilot. I was at best working on becoming a good pilot. Yea the was a very good pilot and he made one mistake.