Steve Fosset – Endurance Athlete
Steve Fosset
Direction of Bishop Airport from Southern Edge of Town
Around May 30 2007 – Big Pine
When adventurer Steve Fosset attempted to fly into Bishop, California he did so into a Chemical Assault – Scorched. I was sitting on public use land a few miles from the Bishop Airport where he was scheduled to land. Fosset left Nevada in a plane owned by Baron Hilton – onetime hotel magnate and parent of celebrity Paris Hilton.
Plane crashes in the Eastern High Sierras are not rare. I prefer the bus to flying out of Reno International Airport.
I am going to challenge the University of California on it’s legal obligation to present history.
In the hills east of Big Pine the oldest living trees exist at over 5000 years old.
James Stephen Fossett (April 22, 1944 – c. September 3, 2007) was an American businessman, aviator, sailor, and adventurer and the first person to fly solo nonstop around the world in a balloon. He made his fortune in the financial services industry, and was best known for many world records, including five nonstop circumnavigations of the Earth: as a long-distance solo balloonist, as a sailor, and as a solo flight fixed-wing aircraft pilot.
A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, Fossett set 116 records in five different sports, 60 of which still stand, as of June 2007[update].
On September 3, 2007, Fossett was reported missing after the plane he was flying over the Nevada desert failed to return. Despite a month of searches by the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) and others, Fossett could not be found, and the search by CAP was called off on October 2, 2007. Privately funded and privately directed search efforts continued but, after a request from Fossett's wife, he was declared legally dead on February 15, 2008.
On September 29, 2008, a hiker found Fossett's identification cards in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in California, and the crash site was discovered a few days later. On November 3, 2008, tests conducted on two bones recovered about 750 feet from the site of the crash produced a match to Fossett's DNA. This ostensibly confirmed his death.
According to interviews by the Discovery Channel (who provided a camera crew the day after his FAA ID and $1005 were found by a hiker) the one fact that disputes the official findings was the location of hardware that had been part of the pilot's harness. Pilots who knew him were interviewed by the Discovery Channel for a January 2009 documentary on the incident in which they expressed certainty that the harness could not have been released by any animal that may have moved his body. The reason for their opinion pertains to the mechanism (unscrewing) required to release the harness and the fact that no other hardware was attached. However, there is no evidence to suggest that this harness was in use or being worn at the time of the crash.
posted by Kronin at 12:16 PM
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