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Fossett & the Bermuda Triangle

Boo said:
Has to be alien activity from Area 51.:rolleyes:
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Oh sure. . .blame the Mexicans! ;)


Back to the Bermuda Triangle:

More significantly a check of Lloyd's of London's accident records by the editor of Fate in 1975 showed that the triangle was a no more dangerous part of the ocean than any other. U.S. Coast Guard records confirmed this and since that time no good arguments have ever been made to refute those statistics. So the Bermuda Triangle mystery disappeared, in the same way many of its supposed victims had vanished.
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Reference.

Nothing in need of explanation.
 
Huntsman said:
LOL

No, it wasn't Mythbusters. I remember bits and pieces, but I can't recall if it was NG or Discovery...I know I saw the NG "Is It Real?" Bermuda episode, but I think there was a Discovery show that covered this idea.

It was pretty well debunked. IIRC, even the guys who showed it was possible to sink a ship with bubbles suggested that there should be more near misses and accounts. The show never really said "no, this doesn't account for it", but the general feel was that this wouldn't be a feasible possibility.
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You know....it would make a good MBs episode. They could do the boat sinking in a pool….and then say fly some type of remote control air plane through a methane “cloud”.

Bubbling pool...potential boat sinking….explosions (even the plane didn’t crash or explode…you know they would want to blow something up in the cloud) = good times
 
Locknar said:
You know....it would make a good MBs episode. They could do the boat sinking in a pool….and then say fly some type of remote control air plane through a methane “cloud”.

Bubbling pool...potential boat sinking….explosions (even the plane didn’t crash or explode…you know they would want to blow something up in the cloud) = good times
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Maybe combine it with the "tower of methane filled bubbles" they did a while back!!!
 
I wonder why an accomplished pilot like Fosset didn't take a parachute or even file a flight plan. At least a flight plan may have narrowed the search down. No emergency signal has been detected, perhaps he suffered a heart attack during flight, so a flight plan may not have been of any use to searchers if he was on auto-pilot.
 
sinclairmcevoy said:
I wonder why an accomplished pilot like Fosset didn't take a parachute or even file a flight plan. At least a flight plan may have narrowed the search down. No emergency signal has been detected, perhaps he suffered a heart attack during flight, so a flight plan may not have been of any use to searchers if he was on auto-pilot.
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I don't know about parachutes, but his purpose was to fly around to scout out possible locations for an attempt to break the land speed record. I suppose that's why there was no flight plan. He wasn't going from point A to point B, but taking off, flying around and then returning.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
I don't know about parachutes, but his purpose was to fly around to scout out possible locations for an attempt to break the land speed record. I suppose that's why there was no flight plan. He wasn't going from point A to point B, but taking off, flying around and then returning.
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See, thats what strikes me as odd about this. Aren't there already known places in the world - one relatively close in Northern Nevada - that are well tested as suitable for land-speed-record pursuit? There's really no need to go searching. Are the usual locations at Bonneville salt Flats and Flat Rock Desert not good enough?

Scouting for possible LSR attempt locations sounds like a bit of a red herring to me.

(I wonder what he was really doing up there...)
 
madurobob said:
See, thats what strikes me as odd about this. Aren't there already known places in the world - one relatively close in Northern Nevada - that are well tested as suitable for land-speed-record pursuit? There's really no need to go searching. Are the usual locations at Bonneville salt Flats and Flat Rock Desert not good enough?

Scouting for possible LSR attempt locations sounds like a bit of a red herring to me.

(I wonder what he was really doing up there...)
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OMG--thus starts the Steve Fossett Conspiracy Theory! :D

Is there any reason to doubt that he was scouting for a suitable spot? What do you suggest he may have been doing? (My mind boggles at the possibilities--testing out a new top-secret plane whose purpose is to find Osama bin Laden's mountain lair? having a scheduled rendevous with the space aliens that the government has been covering up for years? faking his own death so he could. . . .oh well I give up!)

That other people have set land-speed records in other locations doesn't mean those locations are suitable or available for Fossett's proposed attempt. (In fact, maybe something about the nature of his vehicle made those place unsuitable.) The point of a record is not to duplicate what's been done before.

Seriously, though, at this point I think it most likely that he didn't survive a plane crash. Which is a darn shame (and I certainly hope I'm wrong), because he is definitely among my favorite wealthy people--most of whom have little to no redeeming value.
 
madurobob said:
See, thats what strikes me as odd about this. Aren't there already known places in the world - one relatively close in Northern Nevada - that are well tested as suitable for land-speed-record pursuit? There's really no need to go searching. Are the usual locations at Bonneville salt Flats and Flat Rock Desert not good enough?

Scouting for possible LSR attempt locations sounds like a bit of a red herring to me.

(I wonder what he was really doing up there...)
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I too wondered about that. With his background, I would think he would already have a good idea about where to attempt his LSR. The whole thing seems odd, I really think that something happened during flight that was unexpected. The odds of finding him alive are getting scarce.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Well, yeah. Some of these Bermuda Triangle stories rely on non-evidence (no wreckage was found, the plane or ship disappeared "without a trace") in a large mostly featureless area of ocean, yet we see here how difficult it is to find a crashed plane on land in a relatively small area under ideal circumstances.
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I'm reminded of one of Bill Bryson's articles where he wrote about planes disappearing in the forests in New England. In one case, a fairly large private jet crashed not too far from a town having been tracked pretty much all the way to the ground by radar. Despite a couple of weeks of searching with hundreds of people and some helicopters, no trace of it was ever found. Other cases involved light aircraft being found by hikers several years after being lost when searches had failed to find anything. Given that things can disappear so completely in a fairly civilised area, why should anyone be surprised that they can also disappear somewhere like Nevada or the sea?
 
In the search for Fossett, they've found three previously uncharted plane wrecks. . . so far.
 
Boo said:
Has to be alien activity from Area 51.:rolleyes:



Boo
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Funny you should mention that. Just this morning I was listening to Coast to Coast AM (I like a good laugh while in the car at 3 am. :p) and that topic was brought up. Some caller suggested that maybe Fossett had veered into Area 51 airspace and was taken out by the military. :rolleyes:

Is there any event that these people can't connect to some woo-woo nonsense? :boggled:
 
sinclairmcevoy said:
I wonder why an accomplished pilot like Fosset didn't take a parachute or even file a flight plan. At least a flight plan may have narrowed the search down. No emergency signal has been detected, perhaps he suffered a heart attack during flight, so a flight plan may not have been of any use to searchers if he was on auto-pilot.
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Very few people routinely take parachutes along in light aircraft. An exception to this is when going up to do aerobatics, when they are required by law. Another exception is sailplanes, where they are not required by law, but are generally part of the seating arrangements, and flying without one would be uncomfortable.

He should have told someone where he was going (and perhaps he did), but this is more a common-sense rule of survival in the desert than anything else.
All a VFR flight plan would have done for him is to start a search when he failed to close it. That happened anyway.

The surfaces of dry lakes can vary from year to year, depending on the rainfall, the winds, and whether some jerk with a 4WD has gone out on the lakebed while it's wet. So going out to evaluate surfaces isn't surprising.
 
Right now Fox News is reporting they found a plane
wreck - but they don't know if it's Fossett's plane...
 
Oliver said:
Right now Fox News is reporting they found a plane
wreck - but they don't know if it's Fossett's plane...
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This morning they were reporting that "lead" turned out to be false...and they are also begining to hint that he may never be found. While they've not said it yet, it's obvious he met some type of catastrophic end.

He’s never turned on his watch beacon, no signals from the ground, and his plane beacon failed to activate – which would happen if he plowed into the side of a mountain (ie. a catastrophic crash vs say a crash landing).
 
Ove said:
Yes seems to me there are two problems with the Bermuda Triangle

1. It is not a triangle
2. There doesn't vanish more ships/planes there than any other place.


But still it IS a good story ;)


PS: I do hope they find Fosset he is a great adventurer...
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I can't resist:

Can you even draw a triangle on a globe....?
 
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