Six Unknown Plane Wrecks in Nevada

[gothwalk]

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

There’s a BBC report about the Amazon Mechanical Turk effort to find Steve Fosset’s missing plane from satellite imagery. One of the bits of information in it is a bit mind-boggling:

The search in Nevada by the Civil Air Patrol and many private pilots has discovered six previously unknown wrecks - some of which were decades old.

This is a part of one of the most completely mapped, intensively satellite-covered countries in the world. Further, a lot of it’s desert - rock and mountain, not much in the way of trees to conceal a crash, or water to crash into and sink. One plane taking days to locate is bizarre enough, but to find six others that nobody knew about in the process? Were they ones that were searched for before and not found, or are there planes falling from interdimensional rifts over Nevada?

EDIT: A bit more information on the other wrecks.

Comments

[ragnvaeig.livejournal.com]

Having gone into the backcountry out there for a few weeks at a time, most of it is really poorly mapped because no one goes out there. It's very sparsely populated, vast and wild--as in bring guns and dogs to make sure the other apex predators don't eat you. I bet there are more lost planes in Alaska, too.

[elorie.livejournal.com]

Have you flown over Nevada lately? I have. It's really really BIG. And bare. And deserty. And rugged. There are canyons and crevaces. And unless they had a specific reason for looking (as they have in this case), why would people spend all the time it would take to look at every patch of ground? Just because there's a satellite picture of something somewhere doesn't mean anyone *looks* at it. I find it very believable that they'd find stuff they hadn't seen in decades/didn't know was there.

[gothwalk.livejournal.com]

Never flown over Nevada in my life - but bear in mind that I come from a part of the world where the population density is such that you're almost never out of sight of a house. It would be completely impossible for a plane crash to go unnoticed - not just difficult, but 100% not possible. Hell, a paper dart crash has a fair chance of being noticed.

Part of my interest in this part of the story is just that concept - that there could be almost anything out there, and nobody would know, and that's right in the middle of one of the world's most mapped, most observed nations.

[elorie.livejournal.com]

Nevada's population density is 18.2 persons per square mile, but that's with Las Vegas averaged in. Rural Nevada is more like ONE person per square mile. (Thank you, Google).

[crimmycat.livejournal.com]

When I lived in Fairbanks, playing with maps one day, I realized it was literally possible to take off on a ski trail, turn into the brush, and never see another person again for hundreds of miles; likely even no evidence of civilization but for a plane or two crossing overhead. People go missing; when the weather moves in, and people go out and don't come back, you look - for a few days, maybe weeks, along the routes they were likely to have travelled. Sometimes you find them, sometimes you don't.

All the mapping and the observing takes place in the dense areas. The seductive nature of the technology network is such that people believe it's all there is (thus the surprise when candidates who sweep the bloggers flunk in the real election), but there's a lot of land out there where the net of technology hasn't spread, and people are far and few between.

Almost all of my state is not "on the road system", and it has roughly 1/3 of the land mass of the 48 states that people think of when they think America.

[firsanthalas.livejournal.com]

I reckon if a plane carrying Maggie Thatcher went down over Ireland it could take weeks for her to be found