By Klaus Brinkbäumer
Steve Fossett was born in Tennessee in 1944 and grew up in Long Beach, California. His father was an electrical engineer. When he was younger, he wasn’t athletic, rather he was a chubby boy who liked to hang out at the airfield and watch the prop planes. He also liked to wander through the forests with his father. He was a Cub Scout, Boy Scout and Eagle Scout. He was a braggart, too, as his rather overdone writings show: “During my years at Garden Grove High School, I was elected to be president of an extraordinary number of clubs. I occupied the office of president a total of eight times before I graduated from high school.” What adult remembers his childhood like that?
His travels also point to his uniqueness. He flew to Europe by himself, and swam the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. He climbed Mt. Olympus and the north face of the Eiger along with the Matterhorn. He failed in his attempt to swim the English Channel, decided to skip the normal tourist sights, and flew home.
Then he studied business at Berkeley and Stanford. He worked at IBM and elsewhere; sometimes he quit, and sometimes he was fired. And on their second date he dragged a blonde named Peggy into an airplane. He had signed up to fly in an air show. Peggy didn’t like it. “I’m afraid of heights,” she says, “but I understood that that was Steve’s life.”
Peggy became a banker, and Steve was too busy driving a cab and racing cars for the two to ever have children. Mostly, though, Steve was looking for a way to get rich. Eventually, he found his way in Chicago: The markets were booming and commodities futures were all the rage. Fossett first managed the assets for small clients, but soon there were bigger clients, too. Fossett followed the silver market, advised his clients on the right time to buy and collected a commission -- and by the time he was 33, he had made his first million and began building a company. Twice, he gambled it all and lost -- and had to start all over again. But then there were many years in which he earned over $5 million. As he put it himself: “My competitive mindset and the methodical application of statistical probabilities all added up to a winning formula.”
Bizarre World Records
He set his first world record in his spare time. He wanted to summit the highest mountain on each continent, and the only one he didn't conquer was Everest. He returned to the English Channel, this time successfully making his way across, and he was almost forced to quit the Iditarod sled race because his lead dog refused to go any further. Fossett bit the dog on the neck and managed to come in 47th place. And then Fossett sold his company, Larkspur Securities, and made going after world records his main occupation.
Did he become a billionaire, as the newspapers had it? “No,” says Hilton, “but wealthy.”
Fossett set a number of bizarre world records. He flew a zeppelin airship over Lake Constance -- once each direction -- and broke a record that no one had known about for decades. Yet he also achieved some enormous feats. He failed five times while trying to circle the globe in a balloon, resulting in numerous emergency landings and crashes. When a pair of Frenchmen beat him to it, he tried it alone -- and succeeded. “It’s a great feeling to have a place in aviation history,” Fossett said.
Yet despite his successes, he was something of a dilettante. He really wasn’t much of a sailor, nor a balloonist. He would always learn only what he had to in order to be able to break the next record; he would spend his money to get the biggest catamaran, the most expensive balloon, the best meteorologist, the perfect team. “He always wanted to know who did what and how they did it. He always wanted to get ahead,” Hilton says, “even when it came to drinking beer at night.” Sponsors such as Anheuser-Busch, Richard Branson and Barron Hilton supported Fossett’s ventures. He never asked for money, they say. They just gave it to him.
A submarine was allegedly being built for him, as he was hoping to set the record for the deepest dive in the near future. He had a car built in which he planned to drive over 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) per hour. “That is a bomb on wheels,” his friends said. “It will rip you apart.”
And then Fossett disappeared. On the evening of Sept. 3, Barron Hilton said a few words in front of the fireplace on his ranch. “I want you all to know who we’re looking for,” he said. “Among six billion people, there is only one person like Steve. He is strong. If anyone can survive out there, then Steve can. We are looking for the biggest adventurer of our age.”
The Search for Fossett
All his friends helped. There was Tom Schrade, for example, the pilot and owner of the Grand Sierra casino in Reno. And, of course, there was Mark Marshall, Fossett’s pilot and nowadays Peggy’s support. They flew in concentric circles emanating from the ranch. Thirty vehicles were airborne: C-130 airplanes and 14 helicopters, including the Black Hawks the military dispatched and which flew low enough to blow leaves off trees. After the first day, they changed the plan, switching from concentric circles to a grid plan. Two hundred people searched for Fossett in Nevada and California. Fifty thousand looked for him on Google Earth.
They found 11 wrecks, drug planes without serial numbers among them. One plane had disappeared 40 years ago -- four decades ago a young boy thought his father had abandoned him. Now the adult son learned that his father lay in a ravine in the Sierra Nevada.
But they didn’t find Fossett. No wreckage. No trace. Nothing. At a certain point, the soldiers disappeared again and the journalists, too. And, in the meantime, there is snow on the Flying M Ranch. “We’re still looking,” Barron says.
It’s evening now in Beverly Hills. Barron will be hosting an early dinner in his white villa. On the shelves there are photographs of Paris and his other grandchildren; there are also sculptures of cowboys and Indians. The host is drinking white wine and sitting in front of a projection screen, watching a football game -- New Orleans against Atlanta. “Do you know what I think?” Hilton asks on this Monday in Beverly Hills. “I think that Steve, even as an adult, was still chasing after the merit badges he first started collecting as a boy scout.” Then he’s silent for a while. Over dinner, his daughter-in-law Lisa talks about her career as a pianist and the New Orleans Saints score one touchdown after another. “Something must have happened in the cockpit,” Hilton says after dessert. “Maybe a heart attack or something that made it impossible for Steve to attempt an emergency landing.” It’s 8:30 p.m. Hilton goes to bed every night at 8:30.
If you drive through Nevada, it’s hard to believe Hilton’s scenario. The area is so desolate, and so wide open. How could an airplane just disappear here?
In fact, there is a man working in Reno, Nevada, who knows a lot about cases like this one. Timothy Ball trained as a biologist, but today he heads a company called Fireball Information Technologies. He’s a bearded scientist whose people have flown over the entire region and have taken 80,000 aerial photographs, one for each mile.
Ball is still analyzing these photographs. He’s made it through about half of them. Whenever he finds something blue or something white, he zooms in on it. And if the blue or the white remains mysterious, he takes its coordinates and hands them over to a search party. “An airplane that crashes here,” Ball says, “is usually not a wreck. It shatters into a thousand pieces to the point that you can hardly recognize it anymore. And Nevada is huge.” Then Ball shows a few photos of a Piper Cherokee. You can make out a speck of white here and a speck of blue there. Otherwise, there’s just shrubs and cliffs and sand.
What do you think, Dr. Ball?
“He’s out there,” Ball says “somewhere in the Sierra Nevada or in the White Mountains. I’m sure of it. Even if we don’t find him, 20 years from now a hiker will call and say that he’s found something.”
Translated from the German by Josh Ward
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