Baron’s Blog

Missing since September 3rd in a single-engine airplane Steve Fossett went down somewhere in Nevada. Once can only assume he crashed as an intact aircraft would have probably been spotted by now unless he went into water. From the many crashes I’ve covered for newspapers I predict it will have been a crash on land. Water crashes/landings usually leave floating debris, especially if it’s a lake there’s no place for the debris to drift to.

The story of Fossett’s disappearance has gone to the back-burner of the news, more important stuff like cheating at football, the new iPods and Britney Spear’s train-wreck MTV performance have eclipsed it. To their credit Amazon.com has launched their Mechanical Turk with Google Earth imagery so folks online can help participate in the search. Click here if you want to give it a try.

I tried it, went through about 20 images and because they have coordinates to link to Google Earth you can double-check stuff. But I wonder if the Google Earth images (not the Mechanical Turk images) are pre or post Fossett’s disappearance because I found what looks like an impact site. Or could be a camp site or a tree as it’s hard to tell. Look to the left of the Google Earth marker I placed. There are no similar disturbances around the area and it’s on the wall of a ravine leading to a dry lake bed (something Fossett was looking for).

You can check it out yourself. Open Google Earth and put these coordinates into the Fly to box and hit return: 38.62575465347857,-119.1491102196017

In any case check out the Mechanical Turk and and do a couple of searches. I sent my report in via the comment box reporting a finding at the Amazon.com mechanical turk page. It’ll be interested to see how he is finally found. Most likely by hikers sometime or by someone looking for a future plane crash.

More info here: http://www.stevefossett.com/ 

Wow! Google Earth recently updated their sat map database and images of Kona are much clearer. Now you can make out our building. My car might even be in the parking lot but it’s hard to tell which white car is mine.

So this is a still frame from the Defense Dept video of the bomb strike on Al-Zarqawi.

Here’s a zip file of the KMZ Google Earth reference that appears to be the location though I’m not certain of it.

Here’s the area as I’m guesstimating on Google Earth. Do we have winner?

Today work took me flying over Waimea, over Waipio Valley and back. Seeing the island from the air is a great way to see things.

Here we leave Waipio Valley flying over Kukuihaele back to the Waimea-Kohala airport. You’ll have to see the Sunday, May 23rd West Hawaii Today to see why I was in the air.

Click on the image above to see a movie of my flight, broadband users only as it’s about 9MB in size. We took-off from Waimea-Kohala airport, winged over Waimea town, flew over the back of Waipio Valley then went as far as Waimanu valley before flying back over Kukuihaele and back to the airport with the final view of Mauna Kea in the distance.

A map showing the track of my flight according to my GPS unit that I had on during the flight.