Steve Fossett

On Dec 2, JJ wrote:
Steve was seen between 100 and 200 feet near 9-mile
ranch. He was having fun!

On Dec 3, 6:59 pm, CindyASK wrote:
Possibilities a *Weather, Mechanical Failure, Pilot Failure.

Another possibility that is relevant whether or not it was the cause
of Steve's accident: Flying close to terrain leaves little room for
error and needs to be better recognized as incurring risk. John
Denver's fatal crash would probably have been a non-incident if he'd
been at 2000 feet instead of 500 (per NTSB report) when he messed up
changing fuel tanks. In the PASCO Safety Seminar talk I gave last year
I proposed five "99.9% safe" maneuvers, and it's telling that four
involve flying close to terrain. BTW, a 99.9% safe maneuver is not
that safe! I won't repeat the arguments here since the talk is on line
at

http://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/soar...2007_talk.html

Martin