Plane Facts: Disappearances

Pilot:Matias Perez, lost and presumed dead

General location:Straits of Florida

First missing airplane: December 22, 1910, Short S.27

Location:Somewhere over the English Channel

Mission:Return to England

Pilot:Cecil Grace; body recovered three months later

Next three planes that disappeared:All Bleriot Model 11s

First military aircraft to go missing:Two Short Type C, 1915, WWI, in Belgium

First aircraft lost in polar region:AirshipItalia, May 25, 1928

First airplane lost in polar region:Latham 47.02, June 18, 1928

Reason for flight:Searching for survivors of airship crash

Occupants lost:6, including Roald Amundsen who led the first expedition to South Pole

Number of aircraft missing all time in record-setting attempts:At least 25

Arguably most famous pilot lost:Amelia Earhart, July 2, 1937, South Pacific

Duration of initial search for her lost plane:17 days

Estimated cost of the search:$4 million

Evidence of missing flight:None (still no credible evidence to this day)

Most people lost in disappearance of aircraft:229, Malaysia Flight 370

Fewest lost in disappearance of aircraft:0.AirshipAmerica. Rescued after bailing out of blimp, which was never seen again

Little Prince Author:The Lockheed P-38 of French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry went missing in 1945

Discovered:Wreckage of the P-38 was found just off the coast of France in 2000

Still missing:Maybe. Saint-Exupéry's body was said to have been found shortly after the crash, but it remains highly controversial

Length of time it took Air Force test pilot David Steeves to walk out of the mountains following the 1957 crash of a T-33 jet:52 days

Reaction of Air Force:Accused Steeves of selling plane to Soviets when it couldn't be found

Year plane debris was found:1977 by hikers

Year of Steeves' death:1965 in the crash of a homebuilt of his own design

Original FAA Mandate for Emergency Locator Beacons:1973

Reason for mandate:Missing flight (Cessna 310) with Congressmen Hale Boggs (LA) and Nick Begich (AK) over a remote part of Alaska the year before

Number of planes that searched for the missing flight:60

Length of aerial search for missing flight:39 days

Outcome:Neither the plane nor its occupants, Boggs, Begich, pilot Don Jonz and Begich's aide, Russ Brown, were ever found

Number of distress beacon events, 2016:5,480

Number of searches Civil Air Patrol conducted, 2016:60

Number of those planes located:42

Number of still-missing planes, United States, 2016:30

Number of missing planes in 2016 found via cell phone location:5

Current requirement for locator equipment:Satellite-capable trackable units

Approximate cost of a handheld satellite locator:$250

Estimated percentage that G-force-activated ELTs work in a crash:20% to 30%

Date that adventurer Steve Fossett went missing over Sierra Nevada Mountains:September 3, 2007 in a Super Decathlon aerobatics plane

Length of search:One month, until winter conditions set in

Number of planes employed in search:14

Number of previously unknown wrecks found in first week:8

New technology employed in search:High-resolution satellite imagery searched on Amazon's Mechanical Turk site by more than half a million people

Site of crash discovered:One year, three weeks later, accidentally, by a hiker