No Sign of Fossett, but No Plans to Quit

Sept. 9, 2007 — -- It has been six days since Steve Fossett's plane disappeared somewhere in Nevada. Even though hope is diminishing that the 63-year-old multimillionaire adventurer will be found alive, there are no plans to scale back the search.

"We haven't even addressed a scale-back time," says Civil Air Patrol Major Cynthia Ryan. "I think that you can look at a long-term search on this for at least two weeks. A search of this magnitude typically goes on for that long. We don't always have a famous person in the airplane and this much media here."

The Nevada Air National Guard said it is not ruling out any area without checking it thoroughly.

"There's no telling what may have happened during his flight," says Capt. April Conway of the Nevada Air National Guard. " I think it's just part of the overall, 'Check once, check twice, check as many times as you can.'"

While searchers have found remains of at least six other plane crashes from past decades, they seem no closer to solving the mystery of what happened to Fossett.

No one has seen Fossett since around 9 a.m. Monday, when he took off in a single-engine aircraft from a private air strip on a ranch southeast of Reno called Flying M, owned by his friend, the hotel magnate Baron Hilton.

The flight was supposed to take three hours, Fossett was scouting locations for his latest stunt attempt, to break the world's land speed record.

No one has heard from him since and there have been no signals from his airplane's locator beacon. Fossett's Bellanca aircraft was equipped with an electronic tracking device designed to be triggered in the event of a rough landing, but it has not been activated.

Rescuers do not believe Fossett packed food and water aboard his plane because he had only planned a three-hour flight.

The flight was so routine that Fossett didn't even file a flight plan, and that is why searchers are having such a difficult time, because they have no idea where to look. They have been scouring a massive area, around 17,000 square miles.