At about 8:25 A.M. on Sept. 3, 2007, Steve Fossett took off from a friend’s ranch, about 60 miles southeast of Reno, Nevada, in a borrowed 1980 Bellanca Super Decathlon. A few minutes later, about nine miles south of the airstrip, an employee of the ranch who knew the airplane well saw the Decathlon fly past 150 or 200 feet above the ground.
Fossett did not come back. The search for him, unusually intense because of Fossett’s prominence, wealth and wide connections in aeronautical circles, turned up nothing, and in due course it was suspended. Although his buddy Richard Branson predicted that he might, Fossett did not hike out of the wilderness unharmed. He was legally declared dead after five months, and fanciful theories that he had faked his death in order to escape money troubles or to settle in the South Seas with a beautiful mistress began to sprout.
