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The search for billionaire aviator Steve Fossett was suspended Tuesday, ending one of the largest coordinated efforts to find a missing pilot in modern history.

"We've exhausted all our leads at the time," Amy Courter, acting National Commander of the Civil Air Patrol, told the Associated Press. "We didn't find anything."

The announcement comes in the wake of renewed search efforts over the weekend, sparked by Air Force experts' discovery of satellite and radar images that may or may not have been Fossett's flight path.

While this arm of the search has been suspended, officials have expressed the hope that, with deer-hunting season opening soon, a hunter might come across the small, single-engine plane in which Fossett had last been seen, back on Sept. 3.

The search for the 63-year-old aviator and adventurer has encompassed a 20,000 square-mile radius in and around Nevada's Smith Valley, and has involved Civil Air Patrol pilots from eight western states as well as the Nevada National Guard, the Air Force Rescue and Coordination Center and the state Department of Public Safety.