All the big ticket exploring jobs had already been done when I was old enough to first be robbed of my illusions. Accordingly, I grew up with few heroes beyond Han Solo and Bugs Bunny (all the Frederick Courtney Selous’, Magellans, and Livingstones were dead). Sadly, my generation has been left with billionaire adventurers, ego-stroking playboys who pay millions to spend an hour in orbit courtesy of the Russians and the occasional dotcom twerp who attempts to break the land speed record in a refitted Ducati shaped like a streamlined phallus.

But Steve Fossett was different, more Howard Hughes (minus the insanity) and less Richard Branson. The world record chaser completed five non-stop solo circumnavigations of the globe in boats, planes, and balloons. On September 3rd 2007, he disappeared while flying around the Nevada desert. The search went on for many months before his wife asked that he be pronounced legally dead, but still no wreckage of his aircraft had been found. It looked like another Amelia Earhart for a while, but alas, the mystery is now over.

The plane was found last month, pancaked into the side of a mountain at 10,000 feet, just a few days after a hiker found his ID. This morning, bone fragments found near the impact site were confirmed by DNA tests to be his. From the sounds of it, his body (or what was left of it – and I don’t mean to be macabre here) had been pulled some distance from the crash site and feasted upon by animals. A hero’s death, some might say, but a freakin’ bummer for a world with so few left. The cause of the crash is still not yet known.

Go well, Fossett. I hope the last project you were working on goes forward if your peeps can find the right cojones. You wouldn’t find a trust fund spendthrift trying to pull off that.

My vote is for this dude. Three parts loony. One part awesome.