In defense of the NTSB it appears he went head on into the side of a mountain (10,000 ft). It looks like some bloke stumbling across pieces of debris was going to be the only way to find what was left.
The search parties really even didn't know where to look. Plus the hiker only found a couple of I.D. cards and some $100 bills. Nothing you could see from the air.
There are still plane crashes out in the western part of the U.S. that haven't been found.
http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/36274How could this iconic aviator plummet from the sky without a trace? How could one of the largest and most intensive searches in modern history fail to yield results?
The answer, experts say, is that a plane wreck is one of the hardest needles to find in a rugged haystack -- especially the Sierra.
Pilots don't always file flight plans. Emergency radio beacons may not activate in a crash. Airplanes can slide under trees or bushes, slip into lakes, scatter into bits or be buried by snow.
Even experienced "wreckchasers" -- a growing group of hobbyists -- can be thwarted while hunting for an already documented site.
"Sometimes we'll go out and find the site on the first try," said Craig Fuller of Aviation Archaeological Investigation and Research, a Web-based source of military accident reports and other aviation archaeology information. "But on average it takes four to six trips."
The 400-mile-long Sierra is a boneyard of aircraft wrecks.
The Air Force Rescue Coordination Center in Tyndall, Fla., has mapped nearly 180 crashes within the mountain range -- mainly so searchers can distinguish older wrecks from new ones. Wreckage often is left behind in rugged terrain because it's too tough to haul out.
Many wrecks -- but not all -- have been visited by rescuers or authorities and then forgotten again, once bodies were recovered. No one knows for sure how many other wrecks sit undiscovered.
