Rescue crews have found the wreckage of a small airplane that appears to be the one piloted by adventurer Steve Fossett when he disappeared in the rugged eastern mountains of California a year ago, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said Thursday. Crews conducting an aerial search late Wednesday located what turned out to be the wreckage in the Inyo National Forest near the town of Mammoth Lakes, Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said Thursday. The crews confirmed late Wednesday that the tail number matched Fossett's single-engine Bellanca airplane, he said. Anderson said no human remains were found in the wreckage. Teams led by the sheriff's department would continue the search for remains Thursday, while the NTSB was arriving to investigate the cause of the crash, Anderson said. Most of the airplane's fuselage disintegrated on impact with a mountainside, and the engine was found more than a kilometer away, Anderson said. Authorities started searching the rugged terrain on Wednesday after a hiker found identification documents belonging to Fossett earlier in the week. The wreckage was found about a half-kilometer from where the hiker made the discovery. Fossett vanished after taking off from the airstrip of hotel owner Barron Hilton's ranch in Nevada. He did not file a flight plan, and friends said he was going on a casual pleasure flight. When he did not return, a massive search was launched for the adventurer who held several aviation and sailing records. Despite weeks of extensive land and air searches after Fossett disappeared, no wreckage was found, and a judge declared him legally dead in February after investigators concluded that his airplane must have been destroyed in a fatal accident.
