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Google, Paris Hilton, Ebay,
Britney Spears, Internet Marketing
A tireless athlete, Fosset has swum the English Channel, climbed the Matterhorn and Mount Kilimanjaro, raced in the Ironman Triathlon and completed the grueling 1,165 mile (1,887-kilometer) Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race across Alaska. Now Fosset was said to be searching for dry lake beds where he could challenge and break the land-speed record of 766 miles an hour in a jet-powered car. Yesterday, a total of 45 aircraft, including around a dozen volunteer pilots, were involved in the hunt for Fossett, rescue officials said. Rescuers do not believe Fossett had packed food and water aboard his plane because he had only planned a three-hour flight. Fossett's single-engine 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. On Wednesday, searchers thought they had found Steve Fossett. “We thought we had it nailed,” but the wreckage that was spotted turned out to be years old, said Maj. Cynthia S. Ryan, a spokeswoman for the Civil Air Patrol Nevada Wing, speaking at an afternoon news conference in the town of Minden, whose airport is the base for the search.
Minden is just west of Yerington, the town closest to the Flying-M Ranch, an exclusive retreat owned by the hotel magnate William Barron Hilton, where Fossett took off from a private airstrip Monday morning. His wife of more than 30 years, Peggy, stayed behind, awaiting his return so they could leave Nevada together on a private jet later in the day. Underscoring the vastness of the area being searched, officials said spotter planes have so far found wreckage from six previously unrecorded crash sites, while the area has been described as an "aircraft graveyard." Rescue crews spotted an object today southeast of the private ranch where Steve Fossett was staying 80 miles southeast of Reno when he took off last Monday for what was supposed to be a three-hour flight. Authorities did not say what the sighting was, only that it wasn't Fossett's plane. The false alarm further dampened spirits of the rescuers, whose chances of finding the 63-year-old Fossett alive in the rugged, concealing landscape of western Nevada are becoming more and more slim. Without driving down to the nearest airport and catching a flight to Nevada. Without getting on board a rescue aircraft, braving uncertain weather, flying over dangerous terrain, and getting dizzy from high altitude as you attempt to keep binoculars pinned to your face, you need only to turn on your computer to assist in Fosset's search. Satellite images of the search area in western Nevada provided by DigitalGlobe, the company that supplies images to Google Earth, are now available online. An aviation Web site, www.avweb.com, provides links to review fresh satellite images and instructions on how to look for Steve Fossett's plane or any image that might resemble a small aircraft.
After being shown a satellite image, viewers are asked to check one of two boxes. One
says the image "contains foreign objects that should be
looked at more closely." Viewers then will be asked to
describe them. The other box says the image contains nothing of interest. Fossett's plane should show up as a regular object with sharp edges, white or nearly white, possibly contrasting with the surrounding landscape, according to the Web site. Tips deemed reliable by a team of specialists will be passed on to authorities.
Now
you may be asking what does Paris Hilton, Ebay and Britney Spears
have to do with this rescue? eBay is The World's Online Marketplace®, enabling trade on a local, national and international basis. eBay Inc. (NASDAQ: EBAY) is an American Internet company that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website where people and businesses buy and sell goods and services worldwide. In addition to its original U.S. website, eBay has established localized websites in several other countries. eBay Inc also owns PayPal, Skype, and other businesses. eBay ranks in the top five keyword searches on Google.
Britney
Spears is a Grammy Award-winning American pop music singer,
songwriter, dancer, and author. Britney Spears has sold over
seventy-six million albums worldwide according to Time magazine.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) ranks Britney
Spears as the eighth best-selling female artist in American
music history, having sold thirty-one million albums in the
US. As
a journalist and as a seasoned Internet marketing, SEO (search
engine optimization) professional, this writer knows that many
people world wide are still unaware that Steve Fosset, an American
hero and global legend is missing. Sir Richard Branson, Fossett's partner in a number of his aviation adventures, said he was hoping to help find the adventurer using Google Earth, the satellite mapping service offered by the Internet search giant. "I'm talking with friends at Google about seeing whether we can look at satellite images over the last four days to see whether they can see which direction he might have been flying and whether they can see any disturbances anywhere that they can pin from space," the British billionaire told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Branson struck a more cautious tone last Wednesday, saying he was "obviously worried" that Fossett may be injured because he was wearing a watch capable of emitting an emergency distress signal. If Fossett were OK, Branson surmised, he would have been able to activate the manually operated signal. However, he added, "If anyone's going to end up walking back up [to] the ranch and apologizing for pranging the Hiltons' plane, it's likely to be Steve Fossett."
Fossett did not file a flight plan, but one is not required on flights using visual navigation. When he left, he had four to five hours of fuel for flight. There has been no sound detected from the plane's emergency locator radio beacon, which goes off if there is a hard impact. Steve Fossett is a survivalist. Fossett has survived numerous near-misses and harrowing crash landings over the years, including a 29,000-foot (9,000-meter) plummet into the Coral Sea off Australia because of a storm-shredded balloon. Let's pray that Fossett used his professional expertise in gliding his aircraft down onto a highway, dirt road or desert dry lake bed and is having the last laugh. Even so, every precious second spent that we, from the comfort of our homes and offices, search Google Earth and discover a white foreign object in that dark, unforgiving desert may bring an injured, hungry and brave Steve Fossett back to us. Brandon
Keim of Wired.com sums it up pretty well.
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