steve fossett

SAN FRANCISCO--For Graham Hawkes, the inventor of an entirely new class of deep-sea submersibles, a reporter's question on Wednesday--What kind of fish inspired his new flying craft?--was the perfect opportunity to vent about one of his chief frustrations with science.

"The thousands we don't know of," Hawkes answered, adding that when a world-class ichthyologist friend of his had said he'd never before seen many of the different species of fish they'd passed by while flying far underwater in one of his vessels, "I go, 'yeehah.'"

On Wednesday, Hawkes, his business partner … Read more

In addition to a legacy of adventure and entrepreneurship, Steve Fossett leaves behind a top secret project he'd been working on. He had bought a highly advanced underwater submersible he hoped would take him to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, lower than any point on Earth humans have gone. Reporter Daniel Terdiman joins today's podcast to talk about the project and where it goes from here.

Apple is strongly denying a rumor posted on CNN's iReport page that Steve Jobs suffered a heart attack this morning. iReport is a citizen journalism section of CNN, where people … Read more

Correction: This story reported that Fossett would have been the first person to dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. In fact, a team of two men did the dive in 1960, aboard a bathyscaphe--a "deep boat"--called the Trieste. Had Fossett made the trip, he would have been the first to do it solo.

Steve Fossett was known for many things, but perhaps the millionaire entrepreneur was best known for the many world records he set in a variety of different adventure sports.

And were it not for what seems certain to be his untimely and … Read more

Authorities may have found the wreckage of the plane that adventurer Steve Fossett was flying when he went missing last year.

"The National Transportation Safety Board has dispatched investigators to California to investigate the crash of a small plane that was found (Wednesday)," the NTSB said Thursday in a statement.

Fossett, who was flying a Bellanca 8KCAB, has been missing since September 3, 2007. He took off from Yerington, Nev., for a local flight. Investigators say they found wreckage at about a 10,000-foot elevation in the Sierra Nevada in the vicinity of Mammoth Lakes, Calif.

There has … Read more

As the search for aviator Steve Fossett continues, I've been thinking about the ways we try to track down missing people.

One of the leading independent experts on ELTs (emergency locator transmitters) is Doug Ritter, editor of the Equipped to Survive Web site. Ritter has written extensively about ELTs, which are installed on aircraft; EPIRBs, or emergency position-indicating radio beacons, which are carried on boats; and PLBs, or personal locator beacons, which are carried by individuals. If you have any interest in the subject, you should check out his Web site.

Ritter's most recent blog post, dated Thursday, concerns a recent memo from the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board to the administrator of the… Read more

After Jim Gray, a technical fellow for Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley, was lost at sea in January, Amazon.com set up its Mechanical Turk service to let the public help examine Digital Globe satellite photos of the ocean outside of San Francisco Bay for signs of Gray's sailboat. Unfortunately, Gray was never found.

I spent an evening going through these images on Mechanical Turk because I knew who Gray was (coincidentally, his home page at Microsoft Research was the first entry in my "People" bookmarks collection) and because… Read more