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Branson Enlists Google in Search for Missing Pilot

by Tim Stevens on September 6, 2007 at 12:21 PM

Steve Fossett MissingThree days ago, adventurer and aviation world record holder Steve Fossett went missing after he failed to return from a flight on a private plane. He took off in Nevada on the morning of Monday, September 3, and hasn't been heard of since. Unfortunately, he didn't file a flight plan before taking off, leaving thousands of square miles of open desert to search with no indication of where to look. A traditional rescue would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack, which has led fellow adventurer Richard Branson to call in a few favors.

In an interview with the CBC, Branson indicated that he contacted some friends at Google to source satellite imagery of the area for the past few days to look for wreckage. This bears a striking resemblance to the story of Jim Gray, a notable computer scientist who went missing at sea in January. Many of Jim's friends in high places called in favors to bring in high-resolution satellite imagery processed by Amazon's Mechanical Turk, a human-based distributed computing system that specializes in tasks computers find difficult (like finding boat wreckage at sea).

Sadly, after many months, searches for Jim Gray were called off and he still has not been found. We hope that with the help of Branson and Google, searchers for Steve Fossett find more success.

From Tech Digest

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Tags: Google, Richard Branson, RichardBranson, Steve Fossett, SteveFossett

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