Nevada governor to bill Fossett widow for search expenses

And Who Went looking for Lori Love????? The African countries looked for
about 1/2 a day!

Miami - The first few hours of silence after Lori Love's plane disappeared
off west Africa were not too worrisome.

The "lone wolf," as she liked to call herself, did not like mid-air chatter.
She had asked for this solo flight through long stretches of sky not covered
by radar.

She exchanged a cheerful, routine radio transmission with another pilot
about an hour after taking off from Accra, Ghana, last Friday night, said
Steve Hall. A longtime friend, he had hired her to ferry a single-engine
Beechcraft from Florida to South Africa.

That was the last time anyone heard from Love. Ghana air traffic controllers
failed to establish contact with her about 15 minutes later. Her expected
arrival in Windhoek, Namibia, late Saturday morning passed without her
wheels touching down.

Most troubling: The ace pilot and skydiver never activated a handheld
emergency beacon that would have tipped rescuers to her location by GPS,
Hall said.

Search efforts from several African countries have stopped tracing her
expected flight path, failing for almost a week to find any sign of her
plane or her emergency raft, Hall said.

Love would not have taken off from the Ghanian capital if she had not been
confident her plane was fine, Hall said. A minor electrical problem in the
plane's alternator switch had been fixed during a brief layover in Accra,
and she had 18 hours of fuel to bridge the nearly 2,300 miles south to
Namibia.

"Something catastrophic must have happened," he said. It is not known
whether the electrical glitch resurfaced or if it was part of some fatal
problem.

"I'm just praying she will reappear and give me hell and say, 'You gave me a
lousy airplane,"' he said.

Expert in the air

If it flew, Love knew how to keep it in the air. The 57-year-old Wichita,
Kan., woman was certified to teach flying and skydiving, rig parachutes and
fly helicopters, gliders, single- and multi-engine planes that could touch
down on either land or sea, according to Federal Aviation Administration
records.

Never staying in one place too long, she logged 15,000 hours as a pilot and
completed 4,000 parachute jumps before a bad back made her give up skydiving
in 1999, her colleagues said. Love also ran her own airport in Alabama for
five years before feeling the itch to move again.

She kept her late 1970s Dodge Maxivan rolling, too - 555,000 miles and
counting, Hall said, tuned with a set of tools at least as old as the
vehicle.

"Everything I own is inside it," Love told a National Air and Space Museum
photographer for a 1997 book about women pilots. "I honestly thought by now
I would be tired of that lifestyle and be ready to settle down, but it hasn't
happened."

She had a couple scrapes: a brief marriage after college; a tangle with
power lines that dumped her crop duster upside-down in a cotton field.
Nothing she could not walk away from.

Love was not a daredevil child, but it was hard to keep her on the ground
once she picked up skydiving at Kansas University, said her father, Loren
Fred.

She once parachuted off a utility pole in Oklahoma, he recalled. She also
dropped tools from her helicopter to lumberjacks in Alaska and defied a
chauvinist crop duster in Arizona.

"He wasn't going to hire a woman pilot, but he consented to put her in a
plane and in the most difficult positions and see if she couldn't get out of
them," Fred said. "She did, and she got the job."

Love recalled in the book "Women and Flight" that she could not remember how
she figured out girls could fly; her family did not have a television, but
they would drive by the Wichita International Airport to see the taxiways
lit up at night.

She later learned that flying eased the strain of scoliosis on her back, her
father told The Associated Press.

"That was a relief, really," he said.

After years of moving around the country, Love settled for a time in
Gainesville to pursue a doctorate in special education at the University of
Florida. Three years ago, she gave up her studies and returned home to
Wichita to care for Fred, 95, when his health began to fail.

Love had just started ferrying planes again, commuting from Kansas to Tampa
whenever Hall had work for her. She wanted to make enough money so she could
take time off this winter to finally finish her dissertation, her father
said.

On her last job, she had hopscotched from Tampa to Maine, the Azores, the
Canary Islands and then Ghana over eight days. She wanted to make it to
Capetown, South Africa, in just one more jump after Ghana, but Hall
persuaded her to add the brief rest in Namibia. Heading there, she
disappeared.


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http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=90982

CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) - Gov. Jim Gibbons intends to bill the widow of
missing multimillionaire adventurer Steve Fossett for $687,000 the state
spent in searching for the famed aviator last fall, a spokesman said.


Gibbons spokesman Ben Kieckhefer told the Las Vegas Review-Journal it was
his understanding that the governor will bill Peggy Fossett for costs of
the unsuccessful search.

Fossett, 63, took off Sept. 3 from Barron Hilton's Flying M Ranch, south
of Yerington, in a small plane on what was supposed to be a short pleasure
flight.

During a monthlong search, ground crews, the Nevada National Guard and the
Civil Air Patrol scoured a 20,000 square-mile area, but turned up no sign
of Fossett or his plane.

Hilton, the hotel magnate, later voluntarily sent the state a check
$200,000 to cover some of the search costs.

Fossett was declared legally dead Feb. 15 by an Illinois judge. In making
that determination, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Jeffery Malak said
Fossett left a "vast," eight-figure estate.

Billing someone for the costs of a search is unusual.

On Tuesday, before Kieckhefer revealed the governor's plans, state
Emergency Management Director Frank Siracusa said state and local
government search and rescue workers have a long-standing tradition of not
charging when they hunt for missing persons, even for multimillionaires
such as Steve Fossett.

"We do not charge the rich or the poor," Siracusa said. "There is no
precedent where government will go after people for costs just because
they have money to pay for it. You get lost, and we look for you. It is a
service your taxpayer dollars pay for."

But Siracusa added that the final decision on whether Peggy Fossett would
be billed rested with the governor, who since January has cut state
spending to deal with a budget shortfall projected to top $900 million by
mid-2009.

The Fossetts lived part time in Beaver Creek.