KEY POINTS:
In 1927, executives at MGM Studios staged a stunt flight across America for Leo, the famous lion whose roar still appears in the opening credits of the company's films. They adapted a single-engined Brougham aeroplane similar to the Spirit of St Louis, which had just flown Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic Ocean, but installed extra fuel tanks and a cage for Leo. There were even tanks for milk and water.
The pilot, Martin Jensen, took off from San Diego in California soon after 10am on September 16. Five hours later, he was lost in Arizona's Hellsgate Wilderness and trapped inside a box canyon, a ravine with steep rocky sides and no exit. This is every pilot's nightmare and is one of the theories being explored by the rescue teams searching for adventurer Steve Fossett, who went missing two weeks ago.
Eighty years may separate the two disappearances, but there are some important similarities. Most importantly, the terrain is extremely dangerous for single-engined planes. Most cannot clear the high peaks of the Sierras and instead pick their way through the mountain passes. Fossett's borrowed plane was a high-performance single-engined Bellanca Decathlon designed for stunt flying. As with many single-engined planes since the dawn of aviation, its fuselage and wings are formed of wood and stretched fabric.
Back in 1927, Jensen, with Leo the lion aboard, found himself in a box canyon without room to turn or enough power to fly over the 1,920m-high peak ahead. He crash-landed his plane, and the wings and landing gear were ripped off. Somehow, he and Leo survived without a scrape. After giving the lion some milk, water, and some of his lunch, Jensen set off on foot for help. Four days later, nearly dead from exhaustion, he was rescued by cowboys. When Jensen called MGM to report what had happened, their first question was: "How's the lion?"
It seems to many unlikely that, even if Fossett survived a crash, the 63-year-old could then have lived for two weeks in the wilderness. This week, the search for Fossett's plane widened to include the rugged eastern Sierra Nevada, including the sun-scorched Black Rock Desert. It is also taking in the inky blue depths of Walker Lake, which separates Nevada and California.
The small force of about 40 aircraft now scouring an area spanning 44,029 square kilometres has come up with some surprises. Searchers have stumbled upon the wreckage of at least eight light planes, going back decades, which were never properly logged or investigated at the time.
For William Ogle, 47, a professor of biomedical engineering in Florida, the search for Fossett stirs up troubled memories. In August 1964, when he was 4, his father, Charles "Chuggie" Ogle, took off from Oakland, California, and never came back.
When William Ogle learned last week of the other plane wrecks being discovered, he thought the search to find out what happened to his father might be over. He told the Nevada wing of the Civil Air Patrol that one of the wrecks might be that of Charles Ogle's single-engined Cessna 210. At the moment, however, little is known about the eight planes spotted so far. Ogle's hope is that he will be able to achieve closure on a very difficult time of his life. His father was in the process of divorcing his wife and concluding a US$12 million property deal when he dropped off the map.
While Fossett is the holder of more than 110 land, sea and air world records, Charles Ogle was strictly a weekend pilot. On the day he left, he tried to persuade his pregnant girlfriend to come with him to Reno. She refused, and he got in the plane and left without a flight plan or even a wave.
In 1964, it took two days before people started getting worried about Charles Ogle. The search-and-rescue effort lasted a mere 60 hours, compared with the hundreds of hours already spent hunting for Fossett, not to mention the thousands of internet users around the world using Google Earth to scan magnified images of the dense terrain.
"Yes, there are special resources being devoted to this because of who he is," admitted Major Cynthia Ryan, of the Civil Air Patrol. "Let's not be coy about that. But the basics of what you see here today is what we devote to every search."
She has assured William Ogle that search crews will return to the new-found wrecks to examine them for clues.
The priority now is the search for Fossett. Searchers this week received a tip from a woman who had been staying in a remote cabin north of Yosemite National Park.
"She was in her cabin, and heard a plane fly over ... and then she heard a loud explosion or a loud crash noise and saw a little bit of smoke," Major Ed Locke of the Nevada National Guard said.
It will take four days at least to search the rugged area. In Nevada, searchers are also combing an area where two witnesses had reported seeing a plane fly into a canyon and not come out. The search goes on.
Ogle has been busy joining in the online search for Fossett in the hope that it will turn up evidence of his dad. His own analysis of US military records of crashes reveals that many occurred in the high mountains around Reno. He has also been in the mountains looking for his father's plane and been overawed by the sheer scale of the landscape. "The Fossett thing sort of brings it home the difficulty of finding someone when they go down on a small plane," Mr Ogle said. "If this could happen to him, it sort of makes me feel better about what happened to my father. It happened to a super pilot, not just a weekend pilot like my dad."
- THE INDEPENDENT
