Google Earth to the rescue?

A new development in the ongoing search for adventurer and Richard Branson buddy Steve Fossett.

But as the search for the 63-year-old enters its second week, rescuers have received help from an unlikely source: Google Earth. The satellite imaging program has released new, up-to-date images of Nevada which, through a collaborative system run by Amazon called Mechanical Turk, enables individual users to search from their homes and notify rescuers in Nevada of potential leads. The system’s creators say the plane Mr Fossett was flying would appear as an object about “21 pixels long and 30 pixels in wingspan”.

But rescuers assembled in the western Nevada desert close to the California border are becoming increasingly frustrated. A second wreck was found on Sunday, but again it was not Mr Fossett’s plane.

“We’re finding them left and right. Nevada is a graveyard,” Kim Toulouse, a spokesman for the Nevada department of wildlife, told the Associated Press.

There are 129 known crash sites in Nevada, but officials estimate that over the last 50 years more than 300 small planes have disappeared in the state.

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