Doug Taggart was determined to make the most of his last day of flying on Friday. He was up in the air by 6.30am and would not be back home until 7pm. That would give him up to seven hours solid searching for the man whom he had met once at a hot-air balloon festival in Albuquerque and for whom he had the ”greatest admiration”.
That man is Steve Fossett, the millionaire adventurer who has been missing for 12 days in the wilderness of Nevada. Taggart is a first lieutenant with the Tahoe-Truckee squadron of the civil air patrol; as soon as he heard Fossett was missing on September 3 he dropped everything and joined the first rescue mission the next day.
Since then he has flown more than 30 hours over five days across parts of the 10 000 square mile search area. Other trained rescue pilots have joined him from Nevada, California, Idaho, Utah and Colorado — volunteers every one.
They have had their own safety scares in that time in the Cessna 182s that are used for this kind of searching, as a result of perilous air currents in the area known as the Sierra Wave. ”I’ve flown for 25 years and we’ve seen some of the worst turbulence I’ve ever been in,” Taggart said.
”Falling 2 000 feet a minute, the plane tipping vertically on one wing. We’re all experienced pilots, but that was still unnerving.”
The civil patrols fly in groups of three — one pilot and two searchers scouring the ground with the help of binoculars.
That is close enough, Taggart says, to spot a hub cap, though it is more difficult in the mountainous parts of the search area where there can be tall aspens and pines obscuring vision.
Nevada is the most mountainous state in America if you go by its 314 mountain ranges. It is also the most urban state in the United States, with a high percentage of its people living in Las Vegas and Reno, which leaves the outlying areas largely unpopulated. The third fact that stands out about Nevada that has particularly ominous resonance for Fossett is it is the driest state.
”It’s an incredibly parched, unforgiving terrain,” said Brian Beffort, of Friends of Nevada Wilderness, an author of local hiking guides. ”There are few roads, fewer trails and even fewer people.”
There are natural springs, but they tend to be kilometres apart, and this summer there has been even less rainfall than usual.
Were Fossett unharmed by a crash-landing he might be able to dig in dry river beds or try to catch the condensation overnight, although humidity is also extremely low at about 15%.
Fossett went missing when he set out in a single-engine Bellanca Citabria Super Decathlon plane on what was assumed to be a short recreational flight from the ranch of the Hilton family south-east of Reno. He did not file a flight plan and could have flown for distances of up to hundreds of kilometres in any direction.
As the two-week mark approaches on Monday, the search is growing desperate. ”I have to say I don’t think there’s a whole lot of hope,” said Will Hasley, who helped Fossett write his autobiography, Chasing the Wind.
But Hasley stresses if anyone can survive it is this adventurer. He points to Fossett being an Eagle Scout, the highest level attainable.
”If there’s a cactus to be crawled to and water extracted from it, or insects to eat, or a fire to be conjured out of nothing, Steve will do it,” Mr Hasley said.
The other thing in his favour is that hundreds of people have joined the search, either as civil air patrol pilots like Taggart or as internet enthusiasts poring over satellite pictures provided by Google Earth. They have been backed up by five military helicopters and up to 15 private planes searching every day from the Hilton ranch. — Guardian Unlimited Â