Searchers bank on dogged determination

MINDEN -- New technology is leading the way, but commanders and rescue experts say old-fashioned doggedness and a methodical scouring of the terrain by trained observers provide the best hope for finding adventurer Steve Fossett.

As the search stretched into its 12th day Friday, Civil Air Patrol Maj. Cynthia Ryan said the operation may be tedious, but in the end, they usually find what they're looking for.

Maj. Bill Schroeder has been a member of Nevada's Civil Air Patrol for 12 years and was involved in search and rescue many years before that. He doesn't recall ever failing to find the target.

"Because we keep the search up until we find it," he said.

Granted, sometimes they don't. Hunters, hikers or backcountry day-trippers sometimes stumble upon wreckage months or even years after an accident.

But Ryan remains confident that Fossett's plane eventually will be found, and most likely the old-fashioned way.

"Experience has shown us, if we just keep going back, looking at areas at different times of the day, in different lighting conditions," the plane eventually turns up, Ryan said.

"We have about an 87 percent success rate," she said. "We may look like a bunch of yokels, but we're about the best-trained volunteers anywhere."

Lyon County Undersheriff Joe Sanford said that by Friday, air crews, including private pilots operating from the Flying M Ranch owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton, had covered about 20,000 square miles, an area more than twice the size of New Jersey.

"These areas have been searched by every asset we have, sometimes up to six times," Sanford said.

Despite turning up no sign of Fossett or his plane, searchers remained optimistic.

"I would like to believe the odds are as good today as they were on Day One," Sanford said. "This is not out of the realm of possibility."

Fossett, 63, a millionaire who has sailed and flown around the world, setting aviation and distance records, has been missing since Sept. 3, when he took off from a private airstrip south of here for what was described as a short joy ride.

Air and ground searches involving the Civil Air Patrol, the Nevada National Guard, search and rescue ground crews and private pilots have yet to find a trace of Fossett.

Search organizers estimate the effort has cost more than $500,000 so far.

One of the new technologies being used is ARCHER, an acronym for Airborne Real-time Cueing Hyperspectral Enhanced Reconnaissance.

Developed for aerial spotting by geologists and refined for search and rescue, it can "see" objects that don't belong in desert vegetation, such as a piece of airplane, Ryan said. While the human eye typically detects three light bands, ARCHER can analyze 50.

"This is the kind of terrain that ARCHER was born and raised in, and they want to put it through its paces and see just what it can do. These are optimal circumstances to test that system," Ryan said.

On another technological front, friends of Fossett launched an Internet plea for Web surfers worldwide to get involved by asking them to download Google Earth satellite photos of the search area and report anything they see.

Search coordinators have even encouraged public participation at daily briefings.

"It's going to take one set of eyes to find this plane and Mr. Fossett," said Nevada Highway Patrol Trooper Chuck Allen, a spokesman for the search effort.

Tips -- most of them false alarms -- have poured in from far and wide, including the Netherlands, Belize and Australia. All are reviewed by military imagery analysts, operating from a tent in the parking lot of Minden-Tahoe Airport, where the search effort is based.

Ryan said that as far as she's concerned, the Internet satellite search is distracting at best.

"I don't mean to sound like a naysayer," she said. "I'm a total geek. I love technology. But in this case, it's a bunch of people trying to do something they don't have the training for.

"A debris field typically is 20 to 30 meters in size. I've seen some that are really just burn areas with a darker hole in the center. You have to know what you're looking for."