Steve Fossett's plane has been missing for a couple of weeks somewhere in Nevada. Amazon.com is using their Mechanical Turk program to allow people to help in the search.

If you were to go to their site and sign up for mechanical turk, you could get info on the search. You could then map-dowse the area, and when you got a hit, use Google Earth (with the data updated from the Steve Fossett mechanical turk site).

You can zoom in on sattelite images with great detail. The plane itself or its wreckage may very well be visible.

I see nothing on that site about that program. I never heard of it.

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Hi David,

I'll definitely check out the coast to coast site.

Google Earth is free and gives pretty detailed satellite photos and maps. If you had a search area, you could zoom into 1500 feet above and the plane would appear almost pure white and around 20X30 pixels (assuming 1 piece).

You'd want to get the most recent set of images from the mturk site.

You can see the info on mechanical turk here:
http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

I ran through a couple hundred of the images with my eyeballs.[/url]

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Unfortunately, the plane won't show up on Google Earth. The satellite imagery that forms the basis for the program is usually a few years old at least. Only if the GE folks have uploaded a very recent satellite pass (which doesn't happen very often because it is really expensive), Fossett's plane won't appear on it. However, Google Earth can still be a useful resource in a dowsing project trying to locate him. It's certainly worth a try, and there is a high probably there'll be feedback within a reasonable time.

Best,
Paul

While normally true, that the Google Earth pictures are several years old, you can get current images of the current search area from the mturk website.

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/preview?grou ... EZJZG21T60

This KML file will allow Google Earth to display these new images.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/Fossett-DG-BW/R ... /index.kml

-Al

Ah -- interesting! I did not know that (but I'm pretty new to Google Earth anyway). That does make this an extremely valuable tool -- both for dowsing and regular old "analog" search. Thanks for the info!

Best,
Paul

You certainly could, be right, especially if the plane is fairly disintegrated. The terrain is certainly a hinderance.

However, there is a photo on the mechanical turk site showing what the plane would look like. At that resolution, the intact plane would be ~30X20 pixels - certainly visible to the unaided eye. The fact that the plane is almost pure white is a help.

I'm no forensic engineer, but I know that a lear jet is capable of flying higher and faster than Fossett's plane. I would imagine this makes for a higher probability that the jet would be broken up than Fossett's plane.

The plane is not white, it's mostly blue with some white, see Steve's website:

http://www.stevefossett.com/

It's unfortunate that the mturk search site has that one example image and only that image. That is neither an image of Steve's plane, nor of what a crash site looks like for that type of plane. In the Civil Air Patrol, when training observers, they showed us photo after photo of actual plane crashes, taken from the altitude that we'd be flying. Often they'd show us large photos that may or may not have a crashed plane in them and we'd have a time limit to find the pinky-print sized crash site, or determine that there isn't one.

-Al

You're right. They recently updated the site to remove the wording saying that the plane is pure white, and have included images of the actual plane.

If I've understood this correctly, shouldn't the first question be something like "is the crashed plane on any of these satellite images" to put it crudely.

Hi, Hit&Miss! Until a pro corrects me, I'm going to say your first recommended question is too vague. The plane must be identified in the statement, if the question is to be helpful. Otherwise, you could turn up any crashed plane (and they have), or you might even get a yes answer because of a model plane that's been crashed. The word "plane" could also be misconstrued by your subconscious because there is also a tool called a plane. Hope this is helpful.

Happy dowsing!, Lee

Yes it is useful. Maybe a better question would be to ask if the body of Steve Fossett is in the area covered by the images. Even an aircraft could be a lot of different things.

The point I was really trying to make was to check whether there was anything useful on the images first.

My first reaction is that dowsing is known not to be 100% accurate. If you tried to eliminate images, one miss could eliminate the very target you're seeking. If you find that your accuracy level outweighs that risk, you will be confident enough to drop a "no" target. I haven't reached that level of confidence though, so don't know if I'd even attempt to discard a target area until I'd dowsed it.

Perhaps a professional dowser would feel inclined to discuss this further.

Good luck!
Lee