More than a year after the mysterious disappearance of millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, searchers found the wreckage of his plane in the rugged Sierra Nevada mountains, along with enough remains for DNA testing.
A small piece of bone was found amid a field of debris 122m long and 46m wide in a steep section of the mountain range, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said at a news conference on Thursday. Some personal effects also were found at the site.
Officials were conflicted on whether they had confirmed the remains were human.
PHOTO: AP
“We don’t know if it’s human. It certainly could be,” Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said late on Thursday, hours after the leader of the NTSB had said the remains were those of a person.
Fossett, the 63-year-old thrill-seeker, vanished on a solo flight 13 months ago. The mangled debris of his single-engine Bellanca was spotted from the air late on Wednesday near the town of Mammoth Lakes and was identified by its tail number. Investigators said the plane had slammed straight into a mountainside.
“It was a hard-impact crash and he would’ve died instantly,” said Jeff Page, emergency management coordinator for Lyon County, Nevada, who assisted in the search.
NTSB investigators went into the mountains on Thursday to figure out what caused the plane to go down. Most of the fuselage disintegrated on impact and the engine was found some distance away at an elevation of 2,956m, authorities said.
Search crews and cadaver dogs scoured the steep terrain around the crash site in hopes of finding at least some trace of his body and solving the mystery of his disappearance once and for all. A sheriff’s investigator found the 5cm-long piece of bone.
The remains are enough for a coroner to perform DNA testing, NTSB acting chairman Mark Rosenker said.
Fossett vanished on Sept. 3 last year after taking off from a Nevada ranch owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton. The intrepid balloonist and pilot was scouting locations for an attempt to break the land speed record in a rocket-propelled car.
His disappearance spurred a huge search that covered 51,800km², cost millions of dollars and included the use of infrared technology. Eventually, a judge declared Fossett legally dead in February.
The breakthrough — in fact, the first trace of any kind — came earlier this week when a hiker stumbled across a pilot’s license and other ID cards belonging to Fossett a 0.5km from where the plane was later spotted in the Inyo National Forest.
The rugged area had been flown over 19 times by the California Civil Air Patrol during the initial search, Anderson said. But it had not been considered a likely place to find the plane. Searchers had concentrated on an area north of Mammoth Lakes, given what they knew about his travel plans and the amount of fuel he had.
“I hope now to be able to bring to closure a very painful chapter in my life,” Fossett’s widow, Peggy, said in a statement. “I prefer to think about Steve’s life rather than his death and celebrate his many extraordinary accomplishments.”
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