First reported missing aircraft:Hot air balloon Ville de Paris
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
