Thursday, October 2, 2008
(10-02) 08:39 PDT MAMMOTH LAKES — The wreckage of a plane found near Mammoth Lakes has been confirmed to be that of missing adventurer Steve Fossett, authorities said today.
No body has been found, but investigators said a preliminary investigation showed that the plane Fossett had been piloting slammed into a the west side of the Minaret mountain range in the Inyo National Forest at the 9,700-foot elevation, about seven miles west of Mammoth Lakes. The wreckage was initially spotted late Wednesday by a Yosemite National Park helicopter.
“It was a head-on crash into the side of a mountain, into a rock,” Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said at a news conference. “The plane disintegrated. We found the engine 300 feet from the fuselage.”
Fossett is believed to have died in a plane crash after taking off on a pleasure flight from a private airport in Yerington, Nev. south of Reno on Sept. 3, 2007.
“The crash looked so severe, I doubt anyone could have walked away from it,” Anderson said. Nevertheless, “It’s our job to try to locate the remains and take care of those. The family deserves our best effort,” he said.
There was no black box aboard the plane, Anderson said. Fossett’s view may have been obstructed by clouds, and his instruments may not have shown that he was approaching a mountain, the sheriff said, adding however that the cause of the crash is under investigation.
Some 50 searchers and five dogs are continuing to comb the site of the wreckage in the Sierra Nevada, Anderson said. The National Transportation Safety Board has joined local, state and federal officials at the scene.
The confirmation came three days after Preston Morrow, the manager of Kittredge Sports in Mammoth Lakes, found Fossett’s pilot’s license, a glider license and a membership card for the National Aeronautic Association while day-hiking with Kona, his Australian shepherd mix, in the forest.
Morrow, 43, said today that he started his hike at Devil’s Post Pile and took the Minaret Lake Trail up into the mountains. He was hoping to reach an abandoned mine, but it got late and he gave up. But he then came across the ID cards and money. Authorities believe the money belonged to Fossett.
Morrow didn’t know what he had found at first. It wasn’t until Tuesday that he realized it was Fossett’s name on the documents. He and his wife decided to go back to the site to get coordinates for the area. His wife found a sweatshirt, and he notified authorities.
Morrow, his face showing early-morning stubble, shook his head sadly this morning as he listened to the sheriff confirm that the plane was Fossett’s.
“I woke up this morning at 3 a.m. wondering, ‘Wow, did I really do that? Did I find that stuff?’ I’m very happy that I can help. I found the haystack, and there was that little needle they needed to go back and get,” Morrow said. “I’m glad they did. I’m so relieved, so happy that they found something. Now they can put an end to it, I hope. Maybe the family can get some closure.”
Morrow said he didn’t immediately give the cards to the police because he wanted to get the exact coordinates of his find first.
Page said he didn’t believe Fossett’s widow, Peggy, would be addressing the media.
Morrow said he conducted a television interview at 4 a.m. today and was on the air with Sir Richard Branson, a close friend of Fossett and fellow adventurer. Branson thanked him for finding the debris.
“It was a thrill,” said Morrow, who confirmed that he is unused to such mass attention.
The ID cards were found about a quarter-mile from the plane, Anderson said. It’s possible that they landed there as a result of the impact, authorities said.
California Highway Patrol officers had flown over the general area 19 times, said Jeff Page, director of the Lyon County Office of Emergency Services in Nevada, where the original missing persons report for Fossett was filed. There had been a number of unconfirmed sightings of possible wreckage immediately after Fossett disappeared, but they were among hundreds of tips that came in, Page said.
Page said he wasn’t surprised that the wreckage hadn’t been spotted before. “It’s very heavily forested with trees and brush,” Page said.
Officials had said last year when the search was suspended that they believed the wreckage would only be discovered by a hiker coming across debris by happenstance.
“We pretty much assumed something would be found either in hunting season or the peak hiking season,” said Lyon County sheriff’s Lt. Rob Hall. “And that’s how it worked.”
The original search area encompassed 25,000 square miles, one of the biggest searches in U.S. history.
Page noted that the wreckage was found nearly 200 miles south of the focus of the original searches. He shook his head as he described how search teams had been focusing their efforts in the wrong place.
“They were wrong, I guess,” Page said. “So were the psychics from last year and the mind-readers and all the others who jumped in.”
U.S. 395, the highway Fossett was known to fly along, passes close to Mammoth Lakes as it snakes from Canada to the Mojave Desert. Fossett had been flying in the area searching for dry lake beds where he could attempt a planned land speed record. The Sierra Nevada lakes in the area being searched are generally filled with water, said U.S. Forest Service.
Fossett vanished after taking off for a morning solo jaunt in an acrobatics-style Bellanca Super Decathlon airplane from the swanky private airport – the Flying M Ranch – of his friend, hotel mogul Barron Hilton. He carried just a bottle of water on board.
The initial search teams tried to follow tips from sightings on the ground and partial radar trackings, and then scoped the hunt out to a huge area taking in most of the south-middle portion of rugged, desert Nevada. Three private teams took a cut at the hunt this summer, also with no success.
The adventurer was world-renowned for setting 115 flying and sailing records, including being the first to fly around the Earth alone without refueling. The wealthy financial broker had also swum the English Channel and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, leading his friends to say that if anyone could survive an air crash, he could.
The last fatal crash in the area happened on Dec. 21, 2006, when a Piper plane crashed near a road in the bottom of a canyon near Big Pine. A flight instructor and student were killed in the crash, which happened when they decided to fly up a box canyon at low altitude and hit the ground, the safety board said.
Chronicle staff writer Henry K. Lee contributed to this report. E-mail Kevin Fagan at kfagan@sfchronicle.com.
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