UPDATE: A fellow pointed out to me in an email that others had located this same plane BUT that shadows make it appear to be a plane in flight vs. on the ground. Slashdot thread here. SUNDAY A.M.: A tired Sergeant from the Mono County Sheriff’s called that they’d combed this area already and wanted me to know. Even though I expressed my apology for reaching out beyond channels, he stopped me to let me know that he was *very* appreciative of all efforts expended by satellite imagery searchers and eased my mind that I hadn’t (even with all my best intentions) diverted search and rescue (SAR) efforts.

I’ve communicated with the Amazon Mechanical Turk folks that are coordinating this imagery search effort on how challenging it is to communicate with them in the event of discovery — which is why I took my own steps to reach out to the SAR folks. They’re working on methods to streamline their interface (and make it easier to communicate findings to one, central point) so this sort of thing is intuitive and easy to do in the future.

My wife is out of town and it’s a Saturday night at home with my 12 year old son. Reading this Slashdot article, I thought "Hey…why not do something useful tonight instead of watching TV?" and I went to this Amazon Mechanical Turk site to help out in the search for Steve Fossett by scouring a detailed satellite image for any signs of what might look like a small, white plane.

About three hours into the search, I found the white plane above. At first thinking "Nah…this is too obvious," I couldn’t let it slide and immediately tried to find a way to alert the authorities through the Amazon site, but just couldn’t figure out how to do it with any sort of urgency.

So I instead did a quick search and found the woman (Major Cynthia Ryan) who is running the search for the Nevada Civil Air Patrol. Her voicemail left her home phone but it’s been busy for over an hour. I next called the dispatcher for the local sheriff’s office near where the search central is (Minden, NV) and left the latitude and longitude coordinates with the dispatcher.

For some reason I was troubled. I plugged the coordinates into Google Maps and was dismayed by the significantly lower resolution imagery, but I could see more macro level detail and realized that the plane I found is in California and specifically within Mono County.

Next call was to the Mono County Sheriff’s Office who has the data now. The dispatcher, John, actually called me back to the get the latitude and longitude coordinates since he didn’t do it on the first call we had. He sure sounded more urgent so we’ll see.

The plane looks intact and I sure hope Fossett is found a bit busted up but alive.