Fossett plane sighting another false lead

Rescue crews today headed to another potential sighting of Steve Fossett's plane, however they failed to find the famous aviator who has now been missing for a week.

"Once again, you had your hopes raised and dashed, just as we have," Nevada Civil Air Patrol Major Cynthia Ryan said.

At least six times during the past week search and rescue crews have spotted aeroplane wreckage they thought might be Fossett's only to learn they were from crashes years and sometimes decades ago.

The sighting today occurred within a 80 kilometre radius of the airstrip about 129km south-east of Reno. Rescue crews did not say what they found at the site, only that it was not Fossett's plane.

Fossett's friends have set up a a page on Amazon's Mechanical Turk website.

which allows web users to join in searching recent satellite images of western Nevada in the hope of finding the missing adventurer.

The aviation news website AVweb   reported that one of its readers had found, using Mechanical Turk, what "could be the fuselage and wings of a small plane".

The find, and others deemed reliable by a team of specialists, will be referred to authorities for further investigation.

- © Fairfax NZ News