Mammoth Lakes? A bit outside of the flight plan there, Steve.

It is actually only 60 miles south of the Flying M ranch airport and not that much farther from the area he was suspected of flying to and where his plane was spotted heading towards. But the question would remain what the heck was he doing up there? The site near Mammoth Mountain is nestled in the Eastern Sierra Nevada and he would have had to cross a number of mountain ridges and follow valleys to get there. Sure he could have been joyriding on a nice sunny day deciding to fly west from the dry lake beds he was interested in and loop up to the scenic Sierra's on his way back north to the Flying M. Where upon he  got into trouble.

They had better start looking quick, it is going to first snow on Mammoth mountain Friday.

Even though the search found 6 other planes that had gone missing over the last 50 years I always suspected that he would be found close to the path along the most likely area he had flown to look at that day which was within 50 miles of departure airport. Even though these areas had been searched over, the gully terrain is so deep below some ridges that you could easily drive or even walk right past a small airplane. To find him at mammoth is a bit outside where they thought he had gone but not outside the realm of a possible route he might have taken. I would need a more expert opinion, but I doubt he could have been flying lower scoping out the dry lake beds to his east, become incapacitated and flown on autopilot over numerous ridges to wind up southwest higher in the Sierras.

I had done some work for Steve Fossett previously and liked him. For his racing yacht Playstation he used my company's system design and certain components we supplied.  It was such a high profile project we had proposed doing every aspect of  electronics/ electrical system engineering and installation ourselves. He went with another firm his builder brought in. They managed to overlook some key safety features and the DC power system caught fire during the installation and burned through the carbon/resin hull at the nav station taking all the new electronics with it. I helped asses the damage.  I had great respect for how he managed his crew. He was not a reckless daredevil and put a lot of effort into careful preparation and risk management.

I was consulted at the beginning of this search if the techniques we used on another recent wide area SAR could be deployed to look for Fossett. Unfortunately it was determined quickly that he had not brought his  equipment with him that would have allowed us to track his communications electronics.

I hope this brings some relief to his family as it is unbelievably stressful when someone goes missing without a trace. Shortly before Fossett went missing I had been closely involved in the search of another person who went missing in a similar set of circumstances. In the crucial first days it had been my role to work with the family and this man's people to determine the probability of how long his systems could last, provide operability, and Coms be detected for.

In that case after the initial SAR sweeps, we determined that there was a good chance that if he had not experienced a catastrophic failure, we might still locate him by using  equipment and analysis the Coast Guard did not have.

You can imagine the impact that has on the family. To have to continue to realign their balance of hope and reality. In the process I did some work directly with his wife as she had the most recent knowledge about the vessel's equipment, how he employed it and its history. The missing man's colleagues who were running the private search effort, reached out to some of the same influential people who were involved in Fosset's search. We were able to enlist the help of some of the wealthiest silicon valley entrepreneurs. Who offered up  their private jets capable of long range over ocean flight and other prop aircraft upon which we deployed our techniques.

I coordinated the aerial deployment of electronics that could be used to pinpoint and establish contact with the missing man's communication equipment. Cellphone and satphones whose signals where out of network or low and obscured. The Coast Guard had only first tested such devices in Katrina and the SAR teams on this coast had no experience with it yet at all.

We also determined that it was within the realm of higher possibility that his vessels equipment and ocean conditions could have taken him a bit outside the area the Coast Guard had identified with their models for intensive search. The private search effort expanded even as hope for finding him alive began to diminish. Experts from around the world, alerted by influential people in the Tech industry began to submit data analysis that was compiled into layered models to refine areas with high probability of detection. The Coast guard SAR models are good and set up the most likely areas to search. But they did not have access to some of the data our team developed. Instead of a few isolated  buoy and weather stations to draw from, the oceanographers were able to provide us with advanced real time data from still research level systems like medium frequency radars on the coast that show actual surface currents and microwave scattered reflection radar satellites that show surface winds everywhere. Naval architeques and engineers took the information I developed about how the vessels systems would operate and generated course and speed predictions that could be layered with the conditions data. The PhDs and software engineers who got involved to build these layered models where some of the smartest people I have ever encountered.

We couldn't get the satellites Google uses to overlook our search area fast enough but we were able to book time with Nasa's U2s. As our models had narrowed our search area greatly we felt that we would could design a reasonable search pattern for the U2 that would have a good probability of getting high resolution optical and infrared pictures of where the vessel or debris might have gotten to.

The high resolution imaging did provide some promising leads to follow up on with SAR aircraft. We found everything from patches of dye markers deployed by fishermen to swaths of canvas and plastic that could have been debris. We even found a carcass of a farm animal. But it was for naught.

Unfortunately no trace has ever been found. One of the likely scenarios was that the vessel was holed or experienced a failure that led to sudden flooding. And he was unable to deploy his liferaft. My research had shown that there was a point in the engine cooling system design that if it ruptured in the wrong vessel attitude could lead to siphon flooding of the engine compartment which must be isolated quickly. But in that case it is unusual that no flotsam whatsoever would have been left behind.

Everyone's worst fear was that he had been incapacitated and the vessel sailed on outside the initial search area. In that case he could have been alive for days or more suffering and out of electrical power to communicate. We do not know what happened but the extensiveness of the search leads us to believe it was sudden.

As sad and without resolution this effort was, from all this it appears some new tools and real-time models will be used for SAR. Already the CG here has started to deploy the cellular phone search capable electronics I had used in its prototype form. As the next generation AIS vessel reporting network and other vessel borne networked electronics get rolled out, myself and others are looking into see how they can be further incorporated into SAR.

Last edited by Johnny_Rotten (2008-10-01 20:56:38)

That post should have an abstract. My time is valuable. I only beat off once today, and the sun is getting low.