British billionaire Richard Branson said on Wednesday he was hoping to trace missing U.S. adventurer Steve Fossett through a satellite mapping service offered by Internet data provider Google.
Branson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. he was worried that Fossett, who disappeared over the Nevada desert after taking off in a small plane late on Monday, had not activated the aircraft’s emergency tracking beacon.
“I’m talking with friends at Google about seeing whether we can look at satellite images over the last four days to see whether they can see which direction he might have been flying and whether they can see any disturbances anywhere that they can pin from space,” he said from Barcelona, Spain.
The company’s Google Earth product offers a mapping service which uses satellite imagery.