Update: It has been confirmed that the small plane found wrecked in the area near Mammoth Lakes, California — where a hiker found Steve Fossett’s identification and a sweatshirt — is indeed Steve Fossett’s Bellanca Super Decathlon airplane.

Initial information coming to us indicate that the Bellanca Decathlon flew into the west side of the Minaret mountain range about seven miles west of Mammoth Lakes, Eastern California. A Yosemite National Park helicopter initially located the plane wreckage. A search and rescue team is staying with the plane overnight.

There is no sign of Steve Fossett’s remains in the plane or nearby.

It is unlikely that the millionnaire aviator survived the crash.”It was a head-on crash into the side of a mountain, into a rock,” Madera County Sheriff John Anderson told reporters. “The plane disintegrated. We found the engine 300 feet from the fuselage.”

If that is true, then the question arises about the cash and identification papers which were found a bit further away. It is possible that some animal, a bear may be, carried it away. It is also possible that he barely survived, and managed to get a bit further away but no more.

At this moment, though, all that is speculation.

The Bellanca Fossett piloted did not have a black box, so it is not likely that would be an immediate theory on exactly how the fatal plane crash happened.

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Here is our original story on the topic. The above is a late addition to the story.

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Hiker stumbles upon missing adventurer Steve Fossett’s aviation IDs

A hiker in the remote mountains of east-central California in the United States has stumbled upon two aviation identification cards belonging to the missing millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, presumed dead after his plane went missing 13 months ago.

Steve Fossett, 63, of Chicago, the United States, took off for what was expected to be a brief flight, on September 3, 2007, from a private ranch in Yerington, Nevada, about 120 miles north of the high-mountain Sierra Nevada area where Preston Morrow, the hiker, found the items.

Fossett never returned. The largest air and ground search conducted in the history of the United States, spanning a 17,000-square-mile region, failed to find either Steve Fossett or his blue-and-white Bellanca Citabria Super Decathlon plane.

Steve Fossett was declared legally dead in February 2008 after investigators concluded that his airplane was destroyed in a fatal accident.

Preston Morrow, 43, said in a television interview that he had found the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) ID cards with Steve Fossett’s name on them, along with several $100 bills, while returning from a mountain hike the other day. There was no sign of any wreckage, Morrow added.

A tattered sweatshirt, he said, was found in an area higher up the same mountain ridge by searchers a day later.

The ID cards and the sweatshirt were found in a remote part of Madera County in the eastern Sierras between Yosemite National Park and the Nevada border, but wreckage from the small airplane that Steve Fossett was piloting when he disappeared was not found.

“We got confirmation they were his,” Erica Stuart, a spokeswoman for the Madera County Sheriff’s Office, was quoted by the New York Times newspaper as saying, referring to the ID cards. One of the cards was a pilot’s licence and the other was from the Soaring Society of America.

A spokesman of the US Federal Aviation Administration said he could not confirm the authenticity of the ID cards but said that information on one of the cards matched the FAA information on Steve Fossett.

Fossett’s family, the New York Times report said, was monitoring developments as authorities have set up a command post to search for the wreckage of the plane.

In a statement, Peggy Fossett, the gutsy adventurer’s wife, said:  “I am hopeful that this search will locate the crash site and my husband’s remains. I am grateful to all of those involved in this effort.”

The Fossetts, who were married for 39 years, had no children. Fossett was declared dead by a judge in Chicago at his wife’s request.

Steve Fossett, the gutsy adventurer, held a number of aviation and sailing records. In 2002, he became the first person to fly a balloon solo around the world.