Old plane wrecks found in Fossett disappearance

Flight experts combing the Nevada wilderness for adventurer Steve Fossett have spotted several uncharted crash sites that may finally provide answers for families of those who took off into the desert sky decades ago, never to be heard from again.

William Ogle hopes some of the newly discovered wreckage will be from the plane his father was flying when he vanished on a flight from Oakland, California, to Reno. Ogle was just 5 at the time.

“I knew he had taken off in a plane and never came back,” said Ogle, now a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida. “I can remember flying in his plane. He let me hold the controls, and I remember looking out the window.”

Like Fossett, Charles “Chazzie” Ogle did not file a flight plan for the business trip, so searchers did not know where to look in the vast rural West in 1964, Ogle said.

“They did what they could at the time, and they could have done more, but they had no idea he was heading toward Reno,” Ogle said. “I used to have a large map of California, and I would look at places and the routes he would fly.”

Leaders of the search operation for millionaire adventurer Fossett say they have not had time to investigate the new sites in detail because their top priority is finding the famous adventurer, not recovering old aircraft.

“When all is said and done, they’ll send ground crews in to thoroughly investigate what is left,” Air Patrol spokeswoman Cynthia Ryan said of the old crashes.

Eventually, some of the old crashes should be linked to long-missing aviators, Ryan said. Even small pieces of wreckage can contain a serial number that can be tracked back to the manufacturer and the owner of the plane.

Nevada is a graveyard for small aeroplanes and their pilots. Ryan figures more than 100 planes have disappeared in the past 50 years in the state’s mountain ranges.

More than a dozen aircraft scanned the terrain yesterday for any sign of Fossett, who took off on September 3 from a private airstrip about 80 miles south-east of Reno, along with thousands of volunteers around the world who are poring over online satellite imagery.

Ground crews were headed to a spot about 20 miles east of Minden where two witnesses reported seeing a plane like Fossett’s fly into a canyon but not fly out.

Search planes had flown the area several times, but the second sighting was reported to authorities for the first time yesterday, so ground crews were dispatched for a closer look, said Lyon County’s emergency manager.

Fossett survived a nearly 30,000-foot plunge in a crippled balloon, a dangerous swim through the frigid English Channel and hours stranded in shark-infested seas. But 10 days after he took off on a routine flight and never returned, doubts were growing that he could still be alive.

Since Fossett’s plane disappeared, authorities have received nearly two dozen calls from people across the country saying they possibly had loved ones on one of the planes discovered this week.

Most are just people looking for missing relatives with no known connection to a plane in Nevada.

But one woman in Idaho said her grandparents were in a plane crash in Nevada in the early 1960s.

The body of her grandmother, who possibly wandered away from the wreck, was found, but not her grandfather or the plane.