LOS ANGELES (AFP) — The hunt for missing aviator Steve Fossett has ground to a virtual standstill, police said Monday, two weeks after the adventurer's plane vanished over the Nevada wilderness.
Nevada State police spokesman Chuck Allen told AFP the search for Fossett had been dramatically scaled back with only two grounded aircraft on standby and "four or five" military helicopters now deployed in the hunt.
At one stage during the search for 63-year-old Fossett -- who has not been heard from since taking off from a private airstrip in Nevada on September 6 -- around 45 aircraft were patrolling the area.
However Allen said the Civil Air Patrol had wound down their operations after completing their searches of an estimated 20,000 square miles (52,000 square kilometers) of rugged mountain terrain.
"The Civil Air Patrol feel that they have completed their search of 98 percent of the ground that needed to be covered," Allen told AFP.
"They feel like they've done everything they can at this stage. They will leave two aircraft on standby and in the event of them receiving new information, or a positive lead, they will be deployed."
Allen acknowledged a sense of disappointment amongst pilots and volunteers who had been engaged in the search.
"With all the assets that have been used in this operation there is a level of frustration that we have not been able to find Mr Fossett," he said.
"Everyone involved has put in 102 percent, so yes, there is disappointment."
During the search, rescuers had located wreckage from seven previously unrecorded crash sites, but there has been no trace of Fossett's single-engined Bellanca Citabria Super Decathlon.
The search has been hindered by Fossett's failure to file a flight plan. That has left rescuers searching for a "needle in a haystack."
Fossett has survived numerous near-misses and harrowing crash landings over the years, including a 9,000-meter (29,000-foot) plummet into the Coral Sea off Australia because of a storm-shredded balloon.
Fossett made the first solo nonstop, non-refueled circumnavigation of the world in 67 hours in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer. In 2002, he was the first person to fly solo around the world in a balloon.
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