Without a Trace

From our March 2008 issue: Last Labor Day, Steve Fossett—the investment wizard turned record-setting adventurer—took off in a plane from a remote Nevada airfield. He hasn't been seen since. Our reporter retraces the search for Fossett, while examining the theories behind his disappearance—and behind his frequent attempts to defy death

By Bryan Smith

(page 7 of 8)

The airstrip at the Flying M Ranch

It was from that ranch, a remote spread near Yerington, Nevada, that Fossett launched his ill-fated flight. The ranch lies half-hidden about 80 miles southeast of Reno at the end of a molar-rattling 17-mile-long dirt road. Apropos of its rich owner, the hotel magnate Barron Hilton, the spread features a mansion, a skeet shooting range, and gourmet chefs, among other amenities. Hilton's aerial fleet includes a Cessna Citation V Ultra jet, five gliders, a 1943 Beech Staggerwing, and three hot-air balloons. For the earthbound, the ranch offers a first-class way station between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Over the years, the high-roller guest list has included everyone from Sylvester Stallone to Hilton's granddaughter Paris. Fossett had visited several times, mostly to take advantage of the hot, dry air that makes the area one of the best glider sites in the world. In fact, it was at the Flying M that he decided to pursue the nonstop around-the-world solo flight. His last stay there was to have been a short one, friends say. Then he and Peggy were to return to their home in Beaver Creek, Colorado.

The ranch was deserted when I landed there aboard our tiny Cessna 172. Campbell taxied around, then raced down the airstrip and lifted off south, banking gently left—the same pattern followed by Fossett on his final flight.

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Soaring over the mountainous landscape for the next two hours, Campbell demonstrated how hard it is to spot a plane wreck site. With his copilot, Terry Vanzant, as spotter, we flew over one crash that had occurred several years earlier. "The problem with wreck sites is they don't look like planes," Campbell explained. "You're simply looking for something anomalous—a glint, or a piece of something." The only real evidence of this crash was a tiny sliver of white fuselage that, viewed from our altitude of about 1,000 feet, looked about like a fingernail clipping.

Finding Fossett would be even more difficult, Campbell explained, because the plane he was flying was made largely of fabric over steel tubing. "The fabric would likely have burned," says Ron Ryan. "That would have left the gas tank and engine pieces"—and those pieces, "as small as a napkin," according to another CAP searcher, could lie hidden in a ravine or under ground cover. "If it had looked like a plane, I can guarantee you we would have found it our first or second day," says Ryan.

"We went over this area a hundred times," Vanzant said, as we circled the region. "He could have gone in any direction." As we flew over Lucky Boy Pass, Vanzant added, "He could have flown right up that thing and got caught in a downdraft. Who knows?"

Suddenly, near the entrance to a canyon, Campbell veered the plane into a steep, diving turn. The world tumbled. Gravity pinned me to my seat. My breath caught and my stomach flopped with the butterflies of a roller coaster's first dive. An alarm sounded—the plane was in stall. I clutched my armrests, my heart pounding. Campbell grinned. "That's a canyon turn," he told me—a maneuver Fossett might have had to make if he had gotten himself "in a corner," as pilots say.

CAP pilots are required to take a course in mountain flying to learn just such escape tricks. "This is rugged country," Campbell explained. "People better know what they're doing." On a typical warm day, the kind on which Fossett flew, "it's usually calm and cool in the morning, and as the day goes on the temperature goes up" and conditions become more difficult, says Ron Ryan. Planes cannot climb as quickly, nor soar as high. "Then late in the afternoon, the cooler air off the top of the mountain ranges rushes down into the valleys. By early evening, we get lots of wind, and it makes it very difficult to search mountains. I mean, it's impossible. It gets to be very dangerous."

It's not clear whether Fossett had mountain-flying experience. In his autobiography, he discusses the perils of mountain winds only in connection with ballooning. A preliminary National Transportation Safety Board report—a single-page recounting of the basic facts of the disappearance—did not address the issue of Fossett's competence in these conditions.

Cynthia Ryan says that gathering information from Fossett's family was "a little problematic in this case, because right at the beginning they closed ranks out there [at the Flying M Ranch], and getting access to those people wasn't easy. It was discouraging because we were always thinking, 'Maybe if we'd know a little more about this or that aspect of his habits and what he would have done,'" searchers might have had a better chance of finding Fossett.

The reason for the reticence is unclear, but it's in keeping with Fossett's general mode of operation. Long before the disappearance, Peggy Fossett avoided interviews, and only a select handful of close friends have spoken about his life. But the lack of comment on several lingering questions has deepened the mystery. Among other things, CAP officials were initially uncertain whether the plane was equipped with an emergency locator beacon, as required by law. In an affidavit, Mark Marshall, Fossett's personal pilot at the time of his disappearance, says the plane did have a locator beacon. Still, no signal was ever received.

Search experts say the simplest explanations are probably the most likely. The failure to find any wreckage despite exhaustive efforts is probably due to the vastness of the search area—some 20,000 square miles—and the possibility that Fossett's plane may have virtually disintegrated on impact. Any remaining debris was likely covered over by the first snow.

But wouldn't there have been burn marks? Not necessarily, says Robert Keilholtz, a captain with the California Civil Air Patrol. If Fossett had gone down in a lava bed, "there would be no surrounding foliage burn area to alert searchers to the crash," says Keilholtz.

Other questions surrounding the crash are also easily answered. Fossett didn't fly with his GPS-equipped Breitling watch because he either chose not to wear it or—in a stroke of bad luck—forgot to put it on. (In her affidavit, Peggy Fossett says that her husband did not bring the watch to Nevada.) He didn't file a flight plan because pilots rarely do on short pleasure flights, particularly in such remote areas. If the plane did have a locator beacon, it could well have been destroyed on impact. "It's not that unusual," says Ron Ryan.

As to Fossett's seemingly uncharacteristic lack of preparation—he did not carry a parachute and took only a single bottle of water on the flight with him—Ron Ryan finds little to warrant suspicion. "It was just a pleasure flight. He was going to be leaving the ranch later that afternoon. And then he was going to hop in his own plane and head out of town." Arbor, Fossett's longtime friend, agrees. "This was like a walk across Michigan Avenue," he says.