A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, Fossett set more than one hundred records[verification needed] in five different sports, sixty of which still stood at the time of his death.

[3] In college at Stanford University, Fossett was already known as an adventurer; his Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity brothers convinced him to swim to Alcatraz and raise a banner that read "Beat Cal" on the wall of the prison, closed two years previously.

He began working in 1976 for Drexel Burnham, which assigned him one of its memberships on the Chicago Board of Trade and permitted him to market the services of the firm from a phone on the floor of that exchange.

[5][10] After fifteen years of working for other companies,[3] Fossett founded his own firms, Marathon Securities and Lakota Trading, from which he made millions renting exchange memberships.

[3] In 2005, Fossett made the first solo, nonstop unrefueled circumnavigation of the world in an airplane, in 67 hours in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, a single-engine jet aircraft.

In 2006, he again circumnavigated the globe nonstop and unrefueled in 76 hours, 45 minutes in the GlobalFlyer, setting the record for the longest flight by any aircraft in history with a distance of 25,766 statute miles (41,467 km).

[17] On February 21, 1995, Fossett landed in Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada, after taking off from South Korea, becoming the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.

There are only seven absolute world records for fixed-wing aircraft recognized by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale and Fossett broke three of them in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer.

Their time was 3 hours, 51 minutes, 52 seconds, an average speed of 546.44 mph (879.41 km/h), which broke the previous turboprop transcontinental record held by Chuck Yeager and Renald Davenport.

[34] On July 2, 2005, Fossett and co-pilot Mark Rebholz recreated the first nonstop crossing of the Atlantic which was made by the British team of John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown in June 1919 in a Vickers Vimy biplane.

[3] The team of Steve Fossett and Terry Delore (NZ) set ten official world records in gliders while flying in three major locations: New Zealand, Argentina, and Nevada, United States.

Fossett competed in and completed premier endurance sports events, including the 1,165-mile (1,875 km) Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, in which he finished 47th on his second try in 1992 after training for five years.

[3] Fossett competed in the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii[9] (finishing in 1996 in 15:53:10),[45] the Boston Marathon, and the Leadville Trail 100, a 100-mile (160 km) Colorado ultramarathon which involves running up to elevations of more than 12,600 feet (3,800 m) in the Rocky Mountains.

[9] In 1998, one of the unsuccessful attempts at the ballooning record ended with a five-mile (8 km) plummet into the Coral Sea off the coast of Australia that nearly killed Fossett;[27] he waited 72 hours to be rescued, at a cost of $500,000.

That year, Fossett flew farther for less money than better-financed expeditions (including one supported by Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson) in part due to his ability to fly in an unpressurized capsule, a result of his heavy physical training at high altitudes.

[53] At 8:45 a.m. on the morning of Monday, September 3, 2007, Fossett took off in a single-engine Champion 8KCAB Super Decathlon light aircraft from the Flying-M Ranch private airstrip, near Smith Valley, Nevada.

[54] It was first thought that Fossett may have also been wearing a Breitling Emergency watch with a manually operated ELT that had a range of up to 90 miles (140 km), but no signal was received from it.

[55] Fossett took off with enough fuel for four to five hours of flight, according to spokesperson Major Cynthia S. Ryan, Public Information Officer with the Civil Air Patrol (CAP).

[56] Searchers with CAP were told that Fossett had gone out for a short flight, possibly including the areas of Lucky Boy Pass and Walker Lake.

CAP Major Cynthia Ryan suggested that he might have been out scouting for potential sites to conduct a planned land speed run though Fossett's wife said the flight was a pleasure trip.

[62] The urgency of what was still regarded as a rescue mission meant that minimal immediate effort was made to identify the aircraft in the uncharted crash sites,[63] although some had speculated that one could have belonged to Charles Clifford Ogle, missing since 1964.

[65] On September 8, the first of a series of new high-resolution imagery from DigitalGlobe was made available via the Amazon Mechanical Turk beta website so that users could flag potential areas of interest for searching.

[67] She said that persons purporting to have seen the aircraft on the Mechanical Turk or have special knowledge clogged her email during critical days of the search, and for even months afterward.

[citation needed] Ryan noted that every message, letter, or phone call was taken seriously, which swamped the USAF specialists assigned the task of reviewing every one of them without regard to apparent plausibility.

[73] On September 19, 2007, authorities confirmed they would stop actively looking for Fossett in the Nevada Desert, but would keep air crews on standby to fly to possible crash sites.

[77] On August 23, 2008, almost a year after Fossett disappeared, twenty-eight friends and admirers conducted a foot search based on new information and computer modeling.

[82] Days prior to this announcement, state Emergency Management Director Frank Siracusa noted that "there is no precedent where government will go after people for costs just because they have money to pay for it.

At an April 10, 2008, Legislature's Interim Finance Committee hearing, Siracusa indicated that he had hired an independent auditor to review costs incurred by the state in searching for Fossett, but added, "We are doing an audit but not because we are critical of anybody or suspect something was done wrong".

[84] On September 29, 2008, a hiker found three crumpled identification cards in the eastern Sierra Nevada in California about 65 miles (100 km) south (186 degrees) of Fossett's take-off site.

[85][86] On October 1, late in the day, air search teams spotted wreckage on the ground at an elevation of 10,100 feet (3,100 m), about 750 yards (690 m) from where the personal items had been found.