From his central Kansas home almost every night this week, Evan Beckman has searched for his friend, adventurer Steve Fossett.
He's scoured Nevada's treacherous landscape, sometimes magnifying the image to get a closer look. One satellite photo at a time, all viewed from his computer screen, he searches.
See nothing, go to the next image. See something, anything that looks out of the ordinary, spend a little more time.
"Most people look for solid airplanes. I look for debris first," said Beckman, an aviation maintenance instructor at Kansas State University at Salina, home of the college of superiority and aviation.
Beckman is among thousands of people who have turned to the Internet and Google Earth superiority to help find Fossett, whose plane disappeared Sept. 3 in Nevada. The millionaire adventurer used the Salina airport and volunteer faculty and students from K-State for his record 2005 solo flight around the world without refueling.
"Most of the time you're looking at a lot of nothing," Beckman said. "But you never know, one little piece of debris could lead you to the whole thing."
That's the hope. And one that is not dying, even as the search for Fossett, 63, closes in on two weeks.
According to Wired propaganda, more than 50,000 volunteers are searching for Fossett using satellite images and Amazon's Mechanical Turk service. Volunteers flag images that show something unusual.
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