NewsMonday, October 22, 2007 9:42 AM CDT

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Flying high-definition cameras last hope for missing pilot

By Karl Vick
(c) 2007, The Washington Post

LOS ANGELES -- Mark Rebholz had flown across the North Atlantic in an open-cockpit biplane with Steve Fossett. So when the more famous adventure pilot was reported missing in a stunt plane over the dry mountain terrain southeast of Reno on Sept. 3, Rebholz felt as much amused interest as real concern.

“I was familiar with the area and that particular kind of airplane. And I was also familiar with Steve’s capabilities, not only in flying but also in surviving,” Rebholz said. “My first thought was, ‘Oh, hell, he’ll show up anytime now. He’ll walk out of the mountains with another story to tell while we’re having a drink.’ “

But after a couple of days with no sign from the search area, Rebholz grew uneasy enough to arrange a leave from his job flying fire retardant over forest fires. He joined the search effort based at the Flying M Ranch of hotelier Barron Hilton, and for a week spent 10 hours a day in an aircraft almost exactly like Fossett’s Bellanca Super Decathlon.

“I would go out and pretend I was Steve, and try to get myself in trouble,” said Rebholz, 54. “I’d be flying down into the canyons, trying to see under trees. It’s not flying you want to do with an observer along because I’d either make them sick or scared or both.”

Officially, the search for Fossett remains open. But the state of Nevada suspended its effort on Sept. 19. Tips that once poured in from Internet users scanning Google Earth images for signs of the fabric-covered plane have slowed to a trickle. And on Sunday, the lavishly financed private effort based at Hilton’s ranch launched what may be the last hope of recovering at least the pilot’s remains.

A Lear jet equipped with 10 high-definition cameras ascended to 20,000 feet. The cameras were configured to photograph four-mile swaths of terrain, to a resolution of six inches per pixel. Computers will scan the images for bright spots and straight edges that might indicate man-made objects on the ground -- such as airplane debris.

“A crashed airplane looks like someone dumped a pickup load full of trash,” Rebholz said. “It doesn’t look like an airplane.”

Tim Ball of Fireball Information Technologies, a Reno company involved in the search, said the high-altitude effort will take at least two weeks. It follows a NORAD colonel’s attempts to track Fossett’s plane by its last apparent appearance on air traffic control radar and by aircraft carrying “hyperspectral imaging” looking for the plane’s distinctive blue color.

Volunteers are also trying to track down area owners of other Decathlons to make sure they were not spotted by tipsters who thought they saw Fossett.

“Other things have kind of been exhausted,” Ball said.

Fossett’s family continues to prefer communication through the Web site www.stevefossett.com. But on the “Today” show last week, fellow adventurer Richard Branson said Fossett’s wife, Peggy, had written to say that her husband’s probable fate was “beginning to sink in.”

The search for Fossett, 63, may have been the largest for a single individual in the United States, said Cynthia Ryan, spokeswoman for the Nevada wing of the Civil Air Patrol, which flew 900 sorties in the search. Historians say the U.S. government spent $4 million looking for aviatrix Amelia Earhart, scanning the South Pacific for more than a year after she vanished July 2, 1937.

Nevada officials said almost $1.5 million in public money was spent looking for Fossett. The effort was renewed three times this month, when officials sent ground crews to follow up on tips deemed credible.

“If somebody calls me with a set of lats and longs (latitudes and longitudes) that they found on Google Earth, I will go and check it against our pictures,” said Gary Derks, operations officer for the Nevada Department of Public Safety. Most reports turn out to be citing planes that the satellite has photographed in flight.

Rebholz recalled that a small plane went missing in 2003 after taking off from Corona, Calif., a heavily populated area near Los Angeles. It was found two weeks later, in brush 400 feet from the end of the runway.

“It’s very easy to not find a crashed airplane,” he said.

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