World

Web Users Help Search For Steve Fossett

by babblingdweeb | September 10, 2007 at 06:23 am

1146 views | 9 Recommendations | 3 comments

By now most of you have heard about the search for Steve Fossett [NP], the first person to hae flown around the World in a non-stop, non-refueled, solo flight. It is believed that his small prop plane crashed in the mountains and desert areas of western Nevada.
The Internet community is now starting to help out in various ways. Amazon Inc has opened up its Mechanical Turk to help in the serch for Fossett. What is a Mechanical Turk? I'll let Amazon's FAQ page explain it best, but in short: it is a computer system set up for humans to do tasks that are too complex for the computer -but still use a computer to complete. In this case, search though recent satellite images of the relevant search area. Some additional facts: [Per Amazon Blog]

Each tile is roughly 256x256 pixels, representing an area of 85m or 278ft square.
Steve's airplane will appear in the images as a 30pixel wingspan and 21 pixels in length.
We're asking between 5 and 10 people to review the same images so we can be certain nothing was missed.

Additionally, a comment was posted by a pilot on Truemrs webiste that might be a Steve sighting, or a false positive.

FYI. reported Sighting.

On Monday 9/3 Leaving the south edge of Carson City at 11:30, ish’ and driving south on the Hwy. 395 , just near (south or noth of l) the town of Walker around 1:00 PM. in a pick up truck myself and my friend both saw a small plane, it was a light blue (I say) or rust colored (my passengers recall) over-winged single engine plane at about a 2000′ to 3000′ altittude, at about a quarter mile east of the 395, trying to climb north/northwest with a unusaul gryrating motion at a seemingly slow speed.

(As a FAA ground school gradurate and a past student pilot)

I pointed it out to my friend athe passenger in my truck (a High School Teacher) and made a comment like “look at that little guy- he seems to be struggling a bit” .

Now, We both agree that we had also saw a off white twin prop engined aircraft several minutes before leading in the same direction on what looked like a straight line takeoff accent without waver.

My passenger puts the sighting farther south down the 395 then I do, but I do not agree that these planes could have came from the Mammouth area airport as that was later and farther south, we made Bishop at 3:30-4:00 PM. and checked in the a hotel.

We sighted these planes at about 1:00 to 1:300 PM,

Is there a Walker airport?, I do not see one on my search…I have telephone left messages with two offices of the FAA (NV). and have reported the sighting to the NV. HP. dispatch but have not been called back by anybody as of yet.

Mr. Lance Lindeman