British billionaire Richard Branson said today he was hoping to trace missing adventurer Steve Fossett through a satellite mapping service offered by Google.
Branson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. he was worried that Fossett, who disappeared over the Nevada desert after taking off in a small plane late on Monday, had not activated the aircraft's emergency tracking beacon.
"I'm talking with friends at Google about seeing whether we can look at satellite images over the last four days to see whether they can see which direction he might have been flying and whether they can see any disturbances anywhere that they can pin from space," he said from Barcelona, Spain.
The company's Google Earth product offers a mapping service which uses satellite imagery.
The search effort today involved 13 aircraft looking for signs of Fossett's plane in the Nevada desert and the state's mountainous terrain.
The Federal Aviation Administration said Fossett, (63), was reported missing on Monday night after taking off from a ranch in a single-engine aircraft in the morning.
The FAA said the Californian did not file a flight plan, and one was not required. It said Fossett had not been in communication with air traffic controllers and no distress signal had been received.
American adventurer Steve Fossett with his sponsor and friend, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson
"It's rough, mountainous terrain there, there are not a lot of roads out there, rocky; picture if you will Afghanistan," Commander Douglas Russell of the Naval Air Station, Fallon, Nevada said.
Fossett spokesman Stuart Radnofsky said Fossett had been visiting the Flying M Ranch owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton, which he described as a popular sport flying center near Smith Valley, south of Reno.
Mr Branson, who teamed with Fossett on some ventures and underwrote his successful global plane flight, said Fossett was scouting dry lake beds as locations for a future attempt to set a world land speed record.
"Steve is a tough old boot. I suspect he is waiting by his plane right now for someone to pick him up," Branson said in a statement released in London. "Based on his track record, I feel confident we'll get some good news soon."
Fossett was piloting a Citabria Super Decathlon, a plane capable of aerobatics, with enough fuel for four or five hours of flight.
His small plane disappeared as he scouted Nevada's dry lake beds as a possible location for an attempt to break the world's land speed record of 766.6 mph.
Fossett already had sought approval from the US Bureau of Land Management to use a 15-mile-long dry lake bed in remote east-central Nevada, said Chris Worthington, a bureau spokesman.
Fossett's Marathon Racing Inc. had applied for a special recreation permit earlier this year in anticipation of making a run in Eureka County, about 225 miles east of Reno.
Fossett, who earned his fortune as a financial trader, in 2002 became the first person to fly a balloon solo around the world and in 2005 achieved the first solo non-stop flight around the world in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer aircraft.