I doubt this is a matter of rich vs. poor, its simple economics. A very expensive search, made more expensive apparently at the request of Fossett's friends and family. The best mainstream account of the search for Steve Fossett was printed in Adventure magazine a few weeks ago, have a read:
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/news/steve-fossett.html. In there his friend Mark Marshall and primary organizer of the family's interests in the search is quoted (emphasis added): "Bunch said that some areas had been checked up to six times. Mark Marshall, Fossett's staff pilot, had called a couple of days earlier and **offered to pay team expenses.** "He told me, 'Don't stop searching because you don't have enough money.' Well, it's not lack of money that's stopping us. We have run out of places to search."
On such promises do attorney's rely, and bureaucrats who want to fund future SAR efforts rely as well. What SAR hasn't spent the next year's budget on an earnest search for a lost victim? And then spend 9 months fundraising to make it up? No one has spoken up, but the expense of the aerial and ground search was massive, beyond covering with bake sales and gear raffles. And lets be real, this isn't a matter of charging a grieving widow, its a matter of expensing a large estate at least some aspects of a SAR effort that were renewed at it's request. I suspect that any funds recovered from the estate will just pay for the next year's CAP fuel budget, which has gotta be pretty heavy given the increase in fuel prices lately.
I think the article's summary is pretty sobering, that for all the work and effort, it wasn't a very effective search, given the terrain and other aspects. Here's the money quote if you don't read the article in full:
"He knew from scouting work for the mine that the mountains nearby had steep, narrow, and tree-cloaked canyons a thousand or more feet deep. They couldn't be adequately scoped from the air, and many could be accessed only on foot. The search teams, he accurately noted, rarely strayed from their 4x4s. "I know this country, and when I saw them come through, I had to laugh," he said. "Just because you're search and rescue doesn't mean you know how to find someone."
The criticism was harsh and somewhat unfair. The search area for Fossett was so vast that planes, helicopters, trucks, and ATVs were essential. The searchers I met were deeply knowledgeable about the terrain and committed to finding Fossett. But—and there's no delicate way to put this—physical fitness didn't seem to be a priority for many of them. They were passionate about hunting, fishing, and ATVing, but they weren't backcountry types. These were traditional search and rescue operations, managed by county sheriffs' departments, not hard-core wilderness teams, the kind you find in the country's marquee national parks.
This hurt the effort. Here I stood in the area pinpointed by the investigation's two best clues, the radar tag and the eyewitness. It was rugged terrain, the sort that is particularly adept at keeping its secrets. And it was obvious that it hadn't been adequately searched. In the past month some of the most advanced technologies in the history of search and rescue had aided the quest. Maybe what was needed was a lot more boots on dirt."
And in retrospect this wasn't the public fascination with the rich, its more like the fascination our parents and grandparents had with Amelia Earhart, flying around the world - that SAR effort was run by the military, and the greatest ever launched at the time, with no greater hope of success than this one. This part of Nevada is unforgiving of pilot error or downdrafts, and if they do find Fossett's craft it will likely be smashed to smithereens on a mountainside or deep in a valley they had 'searched' many times before. If we can get past this issue of rich vs. poor, maybe there's some lessons in here similar to the Kim incident in Oregon.
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