James Stephen Fossett died he was 63. Fosset 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, DNA test results conducted on bones recovered near the site of the crash confirmed his death, which officials indicated would have happened immediately upon impact of the plane.
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, DNA test results conducted on bones recovered near the site of the crash confirmed his death, which officials indicated would have happened immediately upon impact of the plane.
(April 22, 1944 – c. September 3, 2007)
Fossett was born in Jackson, Tennessee but he grew up in Garden Grove, California.
Fossett's interest in adventure began early. As a Boy Scout, he grew up climbing the mountains of California, beginning with the San Jacinto Mountains. "When I was 12 years old I climbed my first mountain, and I just kept going, taking on more diverse and grander projects."Fossett said that he did not have a natural gift for athletics or team sports, so he focused on activities that required persistence and endurance. His father, an Eagle Scout, encouraged Fossett to pursue these types of adventures and encouraged him to become involved with the Boy Scouts early. At age 13, Fossett earned the Boy Scouts' highest rank of Eagle Scout and was a Vigil Honor member of the Order of the Arrow, the Boy Scouts' honor society, where he served as lodge chief. He also worked as a Ranger at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico during the summer of 1961. Fossett said in 2006 that Scouting was the most important activity of his youth.
In college at Stanford University, Fossett was already known as an adventurer; his Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brothers convinced him to swim to Alcatraz and raise a banner that read "Beat Cal" on the wall of the prison, closed two years previously. (He made the swim, but was thwarted by a security guard when he arrived.) Fossett held various leadership positions at Stanford, including serving in student government and serving as President of a few clubs. In 1966, Fossett graduated from Stanford with a degree in economics. Fossett spent the following summer in Europe climbing mountains and swimming the Dardanelles.
Fossett's interest in adventure began early. As a Boy Scout, he grew up climbing the mountains of California, beginning with the San Jacinto Mountains. "When I was 12 years old I climbed my first mountain, and I just kept going, taking on more diverse and grander projects."Fossett said that he did not have a natural gift for athletics or team sports, so he focused on activities that required persistence and endurance. His father, an Eagle Scout, encouraged Fossett to pursue these types of adventures and encouraged him to become involved with the Boy Scouts early. At age 13, Fossett earned the Boy Scouts' highest rank of Eagle Scout and was a Vigil Honor member of the Order of the Arrow, the Boy Scouts' honor society, where he served as lodge chief. He also worked as a Ranger at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico during the summer of 1961. Fossett said in 2006 that Scouting was the most important activity of his youth.
In college at Stanford University, Fossett was already known as an adventurer; his Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brothers convinced him to swim to Alcatraz and raise a banner that read "Beat Cal" on the wall of the prison, closed two years previously. (He made the swim, but was thwarted by a security guard when he arrived.) Fossett held various leadership positions at Stanford, including serving in student government and serving as President of a few clubs. In 1966, Fossett graduated from Stanford with a degree in economics. Fossett spent the following summer in Europe climbing mountains and swimming the Dardanelles.
In 1968, Fossett received an MBA from the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was later a longtime member of the Board of Trustees. Fossett's first job out of business school was with IBM; he then served as a consultant for Deloitte and Touche, and later accepted a job with Marshall Field's. Fossett later said, "For the first five years of my business career, I was distracted by being in computer systems, and then I became interested in financial markets. That's where I thrived."
Fossett then became a successful commodities salesman in Chicago, first for Merrill Lynch in 1973, where he proved a highly successful producer of commission revenue for himself and that firm. He began working in 1976 for Drexel Burnham, which assigned him one of its memberships on the Chicago Board of Trade and permitted him to market the services of the firm from a phone on the floor of that exchange. In 1980, Fossett began the process that eventually produced his enduring prosperity: renting exchange memberships to would-be floor traders, first on the Chicago Board Options Exchange.
After 15 years of working for other companies, Fossett founded his own firms, Marathon Securities and Lakota Trading, from which he made millions renting exchange memberships. He founded Lakota Trading for that purpose in 1980. In the early 1980s, he founded Marathon Securities and extended that successful formula to memberships on the New York stock exchanges. He earned millions renting floor trading privileges (exchange memberships) to hopeful new floor traders, who would also pay clearing fees to Fossett's clearing firms in proportion to the trading activity of those renting the memberships. In 1997, the trading volume of its rented memberships was larger than any other clearing firm on the Chicago exchange. Lakota Trading replicated that same business plan on many exchanges in the United States and also in London. Fossett would later use those revenues to finance his adventures. Fossett said, "As a floor trader, I was very aggressive and worked hard. Those same traits help me in adventure sports."
Fossett said he did not participate in any of the "interesting things" he had done in college during his time in exchange-related activities: "There was a period of time where I wasn't doing anything except working for a living. I became very frustrated with that and finally made up my mind to start getting back into things." He began to take six weeks a year off to spend time on sports and eventually moved to Beaver Creek, Colorado in 1990, where for a time he ran his business from a distance. Fossett later sold most of his business interests, although he maintained an office in Chicago until 2006.
Fossett was married to Peggy Fossett (Viehland), originally from Richmond Heights, Missouri, in 1968. They had no children. The Fossetts had homes in Beaver Creek, Colorado and Chicago and a vacation home in Carmel, California.
Fossett became well-known in the United Kingdom for his friendship with billionaire Richard Branson, who financed some of Fossett's adventures.
At 8:45 am, on Monday, September 3, 2007 (Labor Day), Fossett took off in a single-engine Bellanca Super Decathlon airplane from a private airstrip known as Flying-M Ranch (38°36′13″N 119°00′11″W / 38.60361, -119.00306 (Flying-M Ranch)), near Smith Valley, Nevada, 30 miles (48 km) south of Yerington, near Carson City and the California border.
The search for Fossett began about six hours later. The aircraft had tail number N240R registered to the "Flying M Hunting Club, Inc." There was no signal from the plane's emergency locator transmitter (ELT) designed to be automatically activated in the event of a crash, but it was of an older type notorious for failing to operate after a crash.[44] It was first thought that Fossett may have also been wearing a Swiss-made Breitling Emergency watch with a manually operated ELT that had a range of up to 90 miles (140 km), but no signal was received from it, and on September 13, Fossett's wife, Peggy, issued a statement clarifying that he owns such a watch, but was not wearing it when he took off for the Labor Day flight.
Fossett took off with enough fuel for four to five hours of flight, according to Civil Air Patrol spokesperson Maj. Cynthia S. Ryan. A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokesperson noted that Fossett apparently did not file a flight plan, and was not required to do so. On the second day, teams of ten aircraft searched but found no trace of wreckage after scouring a large area of rugged terrain. By the fourth day, the Civil Air Patrol was using fourteen aircraft in the search effort, including one equipped with the ARCHER system that could automatically scan detailed imaging for a given signature of the missing aircraft. By September 10, search crews had found eight previously uncharted crash sites, some of which are decades old, but none related to Fossett's disappearance. All told, about two dozen aircraft were involved in the search.
On September 7, Google Inc. helped the search for the aviator through its connections to contractors that provide satellite imagery for its Google Earth software. Richard Branson, a British billionaire and friend of Fossett, said he and others were coordinating efforts with Google to see if any of the high-resolution images might include Fossett's aircraft.
On September 8, the first of a series of new high-resolution imagery from DigitalGlobe was made available via the Amazon Mechanical Turk beta website so that users could flag potential areas of interest for searching, in what is known as crowdsourcing. By September 11, up to 50,000 people had joined the effort, scrutinizing more than 300,000 278-foot-square squares of the imagery. Peter Cohen of Amazon believed that by September 11, the entire search area had been covered at least once. Amazon's search effort was shut down the week of October 29, without any measurable success.
On September 12, survival experts opined that Fossett was likely to be dead.
On September 17, the Nevada Wing of the Civil Air Patrol reported that they were suspending all flights in connection with their search operations, but National Guard search flights, private search flights and ground searches continued.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) began a preliminary investigation into the likely crash of the plane that Fossett was flying. The preliminary report originally stated that Fossett was "presumed fatally injured and the aircraft substantially damaged", but was subsequently revised to remove that assumption. Fossett's friend and fellow explorer, Sir Richard Branson, made similar public statements.
On September 19, 2007, authorities confirmed they would stop actively looking for Fossett in the Nevada Desert, but would keep air crews on standby to fly to possible crash sites. "Nobody is giving up on this man", said department spokesman. "The search is going to continue. It's just going to be scaled back", he said. On September 30, however, it was announced that after further analysis of radar data from the day of his disappearance, ground teams and two aircraft had resumed the search.
On October 2, 2007, the Civil Air Patrol announced it had called off its search operation
On August 23, 2008, almost a year after Fossett went missing, twenty-eight friends and admirers conducted a foot search based on new clues gathered by the team. That search concluded on September 10.
On May 1, 2008, the Las Vegas Review-Journal attributed to Nevada State Governor Jim Gibbons's spokesman, Ben Kieckhefer, the Governor's decision to direct the state to charge the family of the late Steve Fossett for the $687,000 expense of the search for Fossett.Kieckhefer later played that early report down, when he told the Tahoe Daily Tribune that Nevada did not intend to demand an involuntary payment from Fossett's widow, but that such a payment would be voluntary: "We are going to request that they help offset some of these expenses, considering the scope of the search, the overall cost as well as our ongoing budget difficulties." Hotelier Barron Hilton, from whose ranch Fossett had departed on the day he went missing, had previously volunteered $200,000 to help pay for the search costs.
In his later comments to the Tahoe Daily Tribune, Kieckhefer denied outright that a bill for the family was being prepared, and he said, "It will probably be in the form of a letter," which Kieckhefer indicated would include a financial outline of the steps taken by the state, the associated costs, and a mention of the state's ongoing budget difficulties.
Days prior to this announcement, state Emergency Management Director Frank Siracusa noted that "there is no precedent where government will go after people for costs just because they have money to pay for it. You get lost, and we look for you. It is a service your taxpayer dollars pay for," although he conceded that legally any decision would rest with Gibbons. At an April 10, 2008 Legislature's Interim Finance Committee hearing, Siracusa indicated that he had hired an independent auditor to review costs incurred by the state in searching for Fossett, but added, "We are doing an audit but not because we are critical of anybody or suspect something was done wrong". Chairman Morse Arberry queried Siracusa as to why, since they lacked funds, had the state not billed the Fossett family for its search costs, to which Siracusa did not directly respond. In his later interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he stated that his comments to the Committee may have given the false impression that he had hired an auditor for the purpose of later challenging the state's financial burden incurred on its behalf by the National Guard during the search operation. Upon interview regarding reports that the state would seek payment, Arberry was recorded as stating that he was glad to hear steps were being taken to try to recoup some of the costs.
The Nevada search cost $1.6 million, for Silver State, "the largest search and rescue effort ever conducted for a person within the U.S." Jim Gibbons asked Fossett's estate to shoulder $487,000 but it declined, saying Fossett's wife had already spent $1 million on private searching.
On September 29, 2008, a hiker found three crumpled identification cards in the southern Sierra Nevada mountain range in California about 80 miles (130 km) south-southeast of Fossett's take-off site. The items were confirmed as belonging to Fossett and included an FAA-issued card and about ten $100 bills.
On October 1, late in the day, air search teams spotted wreckage on the ground at coordinates 37°40′2.8″N 119°08′0″W / 37.667444, -119.13333 (Steve Fossett Aircraft Crash Site)Coordinates: 37°40′2.8″N 119°08′0″W / 37.667444, -119.13333 (Steve Fossett Aircraft Crash Site) at a height of 10,100 feet (3,100 m) and within about 500 yards (460 m) of where the personal items were initially found. Later that evening the teams confirmed identification of the tail number of Fossett's plane. The crash site is on a slope beneath the southwest side of a ridge line (600 feet (183 m) lower than the top of the ridge) in the Ansel Adams Wilderness and in Madera County, California. Other named places near the crash site include Emily Lake (0.7 miles (1.1 km) northeast), Minaret Lake (1.8 miles (2.9 km) west-southwest), the Minaret peaks (3 miles (5 km) west), Devils Postpile National Monument (4.5 miles (7.2 km) southeast) and the town of Mammoth Lakes (the nearest populated place, 9 miles (14 km) east-southeast). The site is 10 miles (16 km) east of Yosemite National Park.
Over the next two days, ground searchers found four bone fragments that were about 2 inches (5 cm) by 1.5 inches (4 cm) in size. However, DNA tests subsequently showed that these fragments were not human.
On October 29, search teams recovered two large human bones that they suspected might belong to Fossett. Tennis shoes with animal bite marks on them were also recovered. On November 3, California police coroners said that DNA testing of the two bones by a California Department of Justice forensics laboratory confirmed them to be those of Fossett. Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said Fossett would have died on impact, adding that it was not unusual for animals to drag away remains. more
The search for Fossett began about six hours later. The aircraft had tail number N240R registered to the "Flying M Hunting Club, Inc." There was no signal from the plane's emergency locator transmitter (ELT) designed to be automatically activated in the event of a crash, but it was of an older type notorious for failing to operate after a crash.[44] It was first thought that Fossett may have also been wearing a Swiss-made Breitling Emergency watch with a manually operated ELT that had a range of up to 90 miles (140 km), but no signal was received from it, and on September 13, Fossett's wife, Peggy, issued a statement clarifying that he owns such a watch, but was not wearing it when he took off for the Labor Day flight.
Fossett took off with enough fuel for four to five hours of flight, according to Civil Air Patrol spokesperson Maj. Cynthia S. Ryan. A Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) spokesperson noted that Fossett apparently did not file a flight plan, and was not required to do so. On the second day, teams of ten aircraft searched but found no trace of wreckage after scouring a large area of rugged terrain. By the fourth day, the Civil Air Patrol was using fourteen aircraft in the search effort, including one equipped with the ARCHER system that could automatically scan detailed imaging for a given signature of the missing aircraft. By September 10, search crews had found eight previously uncharted crash sites, some of which are decades old, but none related to Fossett's disappearance. All told, about two dozen aircraft were involved in the search.
On September 7, Google Inc. helped the search for the aviator through its connections to contractors that provide satellite imagery for its Google Earth software. Richard Branson, a British billionaire and friend of Fossett, said he and others were coordinating efforts with Google to see if any of the high-resolution images might include Fossett's aircraft.
On September 8, the first of a series of new high-resolution imagery from DigitalGlobe was made available via the Amazon Mechanical Turk beta website so that users could flag potential areas of interest for searching, in what is known as crowdsourcing. By September 11, up to 50,000 people had joined the effort, scrutinizing more than 300,000 278-foot-square squares of the imagery. Peter Cohen of Amazon believed that by September 11, the entire search area had been covered at least once. Amazon's search effort was shut down the week of October 29, without any measurable success.
On September 12, survival experts opined that Fossett was likely to be dead.
On September 17, the Nevada Wing of the Civil Air Patrol reported that they were suspending all flights in connection with their search operations, but National Guard search flights, private search flights and ground searches continued.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) began a preliminary investigation into the likely crash of the plane that Fossett was flying. The preliminary report originally stated that Fossett was "presumed fatally injured and the aircraft substantially damaged", but was subsequently revised to remove that assumption. Fossett's friend and fellow explorer, Sir Richard Branson, made similar public statements.
On September 19, 2007, authorities confirmed they would stop actively looking for Fossett in the Nevada Desert, but would keep air crews on standby to fly to possible crash sites. "Nobody is giving up on this man", said department spokesman. "The search is going to continue. It's just going to be scaled back", he said. On September 30, however, it was announced that after further analysis of radar data from the day of his disappearance, ground teams and two aircraft had resumed the search.
On October 2, 2007, the Civil Air Patrol announced it had called off its search operation
On August 23, 2008, almost a year after Fossett went missing, twenty-eight friends and admirers conducted a foot search based on new clues gathered by the team. That search concluded on September 10.
On May 1, 2008, the Las Vegas Review-Journal attributed to Nevada State Governor Jim Gibbons's spokesman, Ben Kieckhefer, the Governor's decision to direct the state to charge the family of the late Steve Fossett for the $687,000 expense of the search for Fossett.Kieckhefer later played that early report down, when he told the Tahoe Daily Tribune that Nevada did not intend to demand an involuntary payment from Fossett's widow, but that such a payment would be voluntary: "We are going to request that they help offset some of these expenses, considering the scope of the search, the overall cost as well as our ongoing budget difficulties." Hotelier Barron Hilton, from whose ranch Fossett had departed on the day he went missing, had previously volunteered $200,000 to help pay for the search costs.
In his later comments to the Tahoe Daily Tribune, Kieckhefer denied outright that a bill for the family was being prepared, and he said, "It will probably be in the form of a letter," which Kieckhefer indicated would include a financial outline of the steps taken by the state, the associated costs, and a mention of the state's ongoing budget difficulties.
Days prior to this announcement, state Emergency Management Director Frank Siracusa noted that "there is no precedent where government will go after people for costs just because they have money to pay for it. You get lost, and we look for you. It is a service your taxpayer dollars pay for," although he conceded that legally any decision would rest with Gibbons. At an April 10, 2008 Legislature's Interim Finance Committee hearing, Siracusa indicated that he had hired an independent auditor to review costs incurred by the state in searching for Fossett, but added, "We are doing an audit but not because we are critical of anybody or suspect something was done wrong". Chairman Morse Arberry queried Siracusa as to why, since they lacked funds, had the state not billed the Fossett family for its search costs, to which Siracusa did not directly respond. In his later interview with the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he stated that his comments to the Committee may have given the false impression that he had hired an auditor for the purpose of later challenging the state's financial burden incurred on its behalf by the National Guard during the search operation. Upon interview regarding reports that the state would seek payment, Arberry was recorded as stating that he was glad to hear steps were being taken to try to recoup some of the costs.
The Nevada search cost $1.6 million, for Silver State, "the largest search and rescue effort ever conducted for a person within the U.S." Jim Gibbons asked Fossett's estate to shoulder $487,000 but it declined, saying Fossett's wife had already spent $1 million on private searching.
On September 29, 2008, a hiker found three crumpled identification cards in the southern Sierra Nevada mountain range in California about 80 miles (130 km) south-southeast of Fossett's take-off site. The items were confirmed as belonging to Fossett and included an FAA-issued card and about ten $100 bills.On October 1, late in the day, air search teams spotted wreckage on the ground at coordinates 37°40′2.8″N 119°08′0″W / 37.667444, -119.13333 (Steve Fossett Aircraft Crash Site)Coordinates: 37°40′2.8″N 119°08′0″W / 37.667444, -119.13333 (Steve Fossett Aircraft Crash Site) at a height of 10,100 feet (3,100 m) and within about 500 yards (460 m) of where the personal items were initially found. Later that evening the teams confirmed identification of the tail number of Fossett's plane. The crash site is on a slope beneath the southwest side of a ridge line (600 feet (183 m) lower than the top of the ridge) in the Ansel Adams Wilderness and in Madera County, California. Other named places near the crash site include Emily Lake (0.7 miles (1.1 km) northeast), Minaret Lake (1.8 miles (2.9 km) west-southwest), the Minaret peaks (3 miles (5 km) west), Devils Postpile National Monument (4.5 miles (7.2 km) southeast) and the town of Mammoth Lakes (the nearest populated place, 9 miles (14 km) east-southeast). The site is 10 miles (16 km) east of Yosemite National Park.
Over the next two days, ground searchers found four bone fragments that were about 2 inches (5 cm) by 1.5 inches (4 cm) in size. However, DNA tests subsequently showed that these fragments were not human.
On October 29, search teams recovered two large human bones that they suspected might belong to Fossett. Tennis shoes with animal bite marks on them were also recovered. On November 3, California police coroners said that DNA testing of the two bones by a California Department of Justice forensics laboratory confirmed them to be those of Fossett. Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said Fossett would have died on impact, adding that it was not unusual for animals to drag away remains. more
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