Minden, Nev. – The small air force combing the Nevada wilderness for Steve Fossett has spotted a half-dozen uncharted crash sites that may bring some solace to the families of fliers 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, Calif., to Reno. Ogle was 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.
Like Fossett, Charles “Chazzie” Ogle did not file a flight plan for the business trip, so searchers didn’t know where to look in the vastness that was the rural West in 1964, Ogle said.
A woman in Idaho told authorities 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, Lyon County Undersheriff Joe Sanford said.
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,” Civil Air Patrol Maj. 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’s forbidding backcountry is a graveyard for small airplanes and their pilots. Ryan figures more than 100 planes have disappeared in the past 50 years in the state’s mountain ranges, which are carved with steep ravines and covered with sagebrush and piñon trees.
More than a dozen aircraft scanned the terrain Wednesday for any sign of Fossett, who took off Sept. 3 from a private airstrip about 80 miles southeast of Reno. Also, thousands of volunteers around the world 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 out.
Search planes had flown the area several times, but the second sighting was reported to authorities for the first time Wednesday, so ground crews were dispatched for closer look, said Jeff Page, Lyon County’s emergency manager.
In California, search planes flew over an area along U.S. Highway 395 after a woman reported hearing a noise that sounded like an airplane, followed by a noise that sounded like an explosion.
